Intellectual Property And The Market Structures Of Software Industry

The emergence of Linux has brought a huge threat for Microsoft, and made a huge impact on competitive situation of software markets, competitive means of software firms and traditional concept about software protection. Following the main clue of competitions of Linux and Windows, in virtue of the method of combining models-Analyzing with cases-investigating , the main issue studied here is connection of intellectual property protection and the market structures of software industry in order to explain the determining factors and formative mechanism of market structures of software industry and PC markets.First, this thesis introduces the histories of Linux and Windows development, then surveys the theoretical and empirical studies in term of intellectual property and the market structures of software industry from economics, which is aimed to induce the main problem of the thesis.The secondly, In consideration of different business models caused by different intellectual property protection of firms, establishing a hotelling model based on network externalities and vertical differentiation , the thesis compares windows software business model with Linux software business model, studies the determining factors and formative mechanism of the market structures of operating system markets: in operating system markets, software firms compete by choosing different business models, which leads different competitive advantages, thus two dominating market structures in operating system markets form: duopoly and monopoly. Further, considering the network externalities and public good feature of software, the thesis analyzes how the market structures of software industry is affected by business models: under the influence of strong network externalities in software industry and all sorts of software-protection law, software firms compete by choosing different business models and the special market structures of software industry form.The thirdly, combining with scale economy and network externalities of PC markets, and considering the different business models of PC firms, authors construct patulous hotelling models, the thesis studies the determining factors and formative mechanism of PC market structures, and analyzes different business models of PC firms : in the scale-economy-obvious and network-externalities-strong PC markets there always is duopoly, compared with that of the traditional industry, the forerunners of PC markets possess the greater cost advantage and the network externalities advantage, the subsequent firms not only have to enhance traditional competitive means, for example, price competition, product differentiated competition etc, but also have to adopt different business models to compete with the forerunners. In the scale-economy-unobvious and network-externalities-weak PC markets, monopolistic competition of several firms often come into being. According as the different comparative advantages, the firms in duopoly cooperate or compete with the firms in monopolistic competition.The fourthly, combining with scale economy and network externalities of software markets, and considering the four kinds of typical market structures of software industry, the thesis expands traditional monopoly-model, bertrand-model and...