vNM Stable Sets and Aumann-Drèze-Shapley Value in Patent Licensing of Cost-Reducing Technologies: Asymptotic Results in General Cournot Markets

It might be a promising idea to use the Shapley value and its variants as pricing schemes of information due to their tractability of variables that constitute the data and the traditional interpretation as a fair distribution of the total surplus generated in the market by the data. As a particular example of information trading, this paper studies asymptotic bargaining outcomes in licensing a patented technology of an external patent holder to firms that operate in general Cournot markets. Our main results are as follows. When the number of firms that operate in the Cournot markets is relatively small, the Aumann-Drèze-Shapley (ADS) value may provide at least as much payoff for the patent holder as a stable standard of behavior shared among players. However, the same result never holds when the number of firms becomes sufficiently large, and the von Neumann-Morgenstern stable sets distribute twice as much payoff to the patent holder as the ADS value.