사용자간 민감도 이질성이 있는 지적재산권 보호의 사회후생효과 분석

The most important issue is to decide the protection level of intellectual property right when the protection policy is established. The weak protection leads to decrease the incentive to develop the product and the strong protection leads to following negative effects. First, strong protection can induce no consumption by extracting original product as well as reproduction. This is because the monopolist producing original product increases the price of original product. Second, this policy can foster the consumption of reproduction due to monopoly pricing. This paper considers that consumers have different preference about intellectual property right protection and get different utility between original production and reproduction. This paper analyzes the pricing process of monopolist with intellectual property right given and investigates the effect on consumer and social welfare. Finally this paper derives optimal level of intellectual property right maximizing social welfare. This paper shows that the protection decreases social welfare loss due to underproduction and does not decrease social welfare loss due to underutilization, However, the protection decreases social welfare loss due to underutilization and increases social welfare when the product development cost is very high.