We analyze licensing contracts in an oligopolistic downstream market where an outside innovator has private information with regard to its technology. Under complete information, the innovator uses a fee-only or a two-part contract to extract the rent that is generated from its innovation, so that all of the downstream firms receive nothing but their reservation payoff. By contrast, under incomplete information with respect to the efficiency of innovation, there can be a conflict between signaling and rent extracting: A contract by the efficient innovator that extracts too much rent invites the inefficient innovator to mimic it. In this case, the efficient type may give up charging the fixed fee and offer a royalty-only contract, so as to discourage the mimicking. Moreover, when the downstream market is sufficiently competitive, the royalty-only contract will eventually win vis-a-vis the two-part contract because it is more effective for the efficient type to signal itself.

我们在寡头垄断的下游市场中分析许可合同，在该市场中，外部创新者拥有有关其技术的私人信息。根据完整的信息，创新者使用仅收取费用或分为两部分的合同来提取其创新产生的租金，因此，所有下游企业都只能获得保留收益。相比之下，在关于创新效率的信息不完整的情况下，信号传递和租金提取之间可能存在冲突：有效创新者抽取过多租金的合同会邀请效率低下的创新者模仿它。在这种情况下，高效类型可能会放弃收取固定费用并提供仅版税合同，以阻止模仿。而且，当下游市场具有足够的竞争力时，