The problem of distributed intellectual property bundles: a transaction cost perspective

Technology is made up of bundles of ideas. Increasingly, these ideas are protected by intellectual property rights. Unfortunately, these intellectual property rights are often distributed across many different owners. Moreover, the technology itself is also used by many different legal entities. Thus, a burgeoning problem faced by creators of technology is how to coordinate the disseperate interests of various intellectual property owners in order to create useful technology. In this paper we apply transaction costs economics to explain the relative merits of different organization forms vis-a-vis the creation of technology that is made up of intellectual property.