Tragedy of Anti-commons, Empirical Evidence from the Pharmaceutical Industry
Abstract: An empirical study of U.S pharmaceutical industry was conducted to directly investigate the validity of the once hotly-debated tragedy of anti-commons for the first time. An index based on Theil’s entropy measure and the Herfindahl type indices were applied to measure the transaction cost difficulty resulting from fragmental patent right ownership structure in pharmaceutical industry. The empirical analysis has confirmed the existence of the tragedy of anti-commons.
