Alan C. Marco is an associate professor of economics in the Williams School of Commerce at Washington and Lee University. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley with fields in industrial organization and law & economics. His research focus is primarily on uncertainty in intellectual property rights, including measuring the magnitude of uncertainty and court errors as well as analyzing the consequences of uncertainty on firm strategy, product market performance, and incentives for consolidation. He has additional interests in property rights in general, and the regulatory importance of the implicit trade-offs between patent policy and competition policy.
Articles
The Economics of a Centralized Judiciary: Uniformity, Forum Shopping, and the Federal Circuit (with Scott Atkinson and John H. Turner), Journal of Law and Economics (2009)
In 1982, the US Congress established the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC)...
The Problem of Shared Social Cost (with Adon S. Van Woerden and Robert M. Woodward), Review of Law & Economics (2009)
This paper presents a mechanism for regulating pollution when industry harm--but not individual firms' contributions--is...
The Role of Patent Rights in Mergers: Consolidation in Plant Biotechnology (with Gordon C. Rausser), American Journal of Agricultural Economics (2008)
Few empirical papers have addressed the impact of the patent system on industry structure. Using...
The Dynamics of Patent Citations, Economics Letters (2007)
The use of patent citations as a measure of patent “quality” increased dramatically in recent...
Credibility and Credulity: How Beliefs about Beliefs Affect Entry Incentives (with Kieran J. Walsh), Economics Bulletin (2007)
In this note we investigate the infringement (entry) decision for a firm facing an incumbent...
Contributions to Books
Mergers and Intellectual Property in Agricultural Biotechnology (with Gordon C. Rausser), Economic and Social Issues in Agricultural Biotechnology (2002)