Trademark And Enterprise's Competition Behavior

In the past 50 years, the rise of Property rights economics, transaction cost economics, the information economics and game theory has greatly advanced the study of microeconomics. Industrial organization research has also undergone profound changes and public understanding of enterprise behaviors in market economy has changed tremendously. Especially benefiting from research findings of behavioral economics, it is realized that, in spite of free behaviors, people cannot reach Pareto optimization necessarily under some conditions, e.g. prisoner dilemma, i.e. the condition under which people behave is very important. Referring to the latest achievements of contemporary economics, this dissertation analyzes trademark and enterprise competitive behaviors and focuses on the aspects of market governance, market operation mechanism, adverse selection avoidance and other industrial organization analysis on trademark.Related research of trademark mainly focuses on the legal perspective owing to the evolution history of trademark. Public's awareness of trademarks starts from the behaviors resisting trademark infringement. And scholars start analyses and studies just from the perspective of tort laws. At the early stage, trademark study concentrates on trademark identification, registration, protection and so on. Then, trademark is more involved in the protection of consumer rights and unfair competition, and People pay more attention to consumer right protection and competition law research. Therefore, present research focuses on the competition law, intellectual property rights law, which needs support of economics. However, it is very weak in this area. Chamberlain, an American economist, introduced an important concept - product differentiation - into the study of industrial organization in 1930's. He argues that product differentiation is mainly caused by trademarks and advertisements, and that trademark plays an important role in competition. Since then, discussions on trademark can often be seen in the study of industrial organization.Economics research about intellectual property rights are more concentrated in areas of patents and copyrights. However, according to the assessment of United States Trademark Association, the value of existing trademarks have gone far beyond the whole value of patents and copyrights. So it becomes obviously that present researches on trademark have not matched the actual need. This dissertation analyzes trademark, especially clarifies the relationship between trademark and the competitive behaviors of enterprises. After discussion of the property nature of trademark, this dissertation reveals the invisible property nature of trademark and the legitimacy of trademark property. Based on the analysis, this dissertation studies the relationship between trademark and competition behavior such as pricing, advertising, transferring, licensing, integration and monopoly. This research has profound significance on correct understanding of the value of trademarks and the magnitude effect of trademark for enterprise competition. Furthermore, it has significant reference value for modification of Trademark Law.This dissertation is divided in to eight parts.The first chapter introduces the research topic, research methods, actual research condition, literature review, innovations and the research prospects.The second chapter discusses the property nature of trademark, and settles the foundation for later chapters to use trademark item from property conception. In the past century, there were significant arguments about the property nature of trademark and the legitimacy of trademark property. As for the nature of the trademark property, when dominated by structure theory, industrial organization theory consider trademark as property and legal formalism is prevalent. Behavior school in industrial organization theory hedged the property nature of the trademark and legal positivism becomes the dominant. So, it is necessary to seriously study the origin of trademarks and legal history of property rights, so as to lay a solid foundation for the property nature of trademark. As for the legitimacy of the trademark property, this dissertation makes a detailed analysis about the Labor theory, personality theory and creation theory on the trademark property and adheres to the labor and personality theory. On the basis of these analyses, this dissertation proposes some suggestions for the modification of China's Trademark Law.The third chapter analyzes the relationship between trademarks and price, the price is the price of the goods with trademarks, rather than the trademark is price itself. The relationship between trademarks and price is an important issue because the assets of trademark do not make sense if trademarks don't affect the price. The conclusion of this part is that the price of the goods with trademark assets is higher than that of goods without trademark. The higher of the trademark value of the assets, the higher the price of goods.The fourth chapter talks about the relationship between trademarks and advertisements. Trademark, which conveys the corporate products and corporate credit, stands for the enterprise. To some extent, trademarks are the static advertisements while advertisements are dynamic trademarks. As the imperfect market competition, the delivery of trademark and credit may be affected uncertainly, limited rationally. That is the root causes of which the corporate pays much attention to advertisements in competition. As the dynamic cost of the trademark is an important part of the corporate cost, this paper sets up a mathematical model based on the trademark, advertising and corporate-competitive behavior in order to find the optimal relationship between them.The fifth chapter analyzes the circulation of trademark. The vitality of a trademark is to apply, which is the essential character of the trademark symbol. From the point of trademark measures, the application of a trademark can be divided into two forms, one of which is not to consider the value of their trademark and only to focus on the role of signal transduction, where the trademarks affect the transaction, thus the enterprises competitive conduct. The other is to consider the value of their own trademark, where occurs the transaction of trademarks. This is a higher level of business competition. It is different with the second and third chapter, where these trademarks are the sunk costs, but here the trademark has become the "object" of a transaction, which is a transaction of the trademark itself. The circulation of a trademark is divided into two forms: a trademark license, and the transfer of trademarks. The former is about the risk of moral hazard problem in information economics, while the latter is about the problem of adverse selection. Trademark licensing and transfer will affect market structure, which causes horizontal integration.Chapter sixth analyzes the relationship between trademarks and monopoly, in essence, analyzes the monopoly of trademarks. On the role of trademarks, there is much controversy about whether a trademark is the means of monopoly. It is related to the development of industrial organization theory. Chamberlain introduced product differentiation to industrial organization theory initially. Trademarks and advertising are important forms of product differentiation. The key is whether the trademark is an entry barrier. If it is, existing market will be dominated by single corporate and form monopolistic competition, which may have negative effects on social welfare. From this point, it is necessary to regulate the use of trademarks.The seventh chapter analyzes the optimal number of trademark in the market. In a market with certain scope where the main difference lies in trademark, in order to make the enterprise achieves optimal scale, the number of trademark should have an optimal value. But the analysis shows that, compared with the optimal quantity of social plan, the quantity of the trademark that can access freely to the market is more than the former. Meanwhile, it analyzes the focal point issues of the trademark by using game theory, that is, the trademark have the phenomenon of convergence under certain conditions, which proves that although trademark resources are abundant, trademark that people have common preference is limited. It indicates the legal rule that enterprise has the own right of the trademark once it's registered exists very big flaw and must be amended.The conclusion part is the summary of the preceding chapters.In this paper, the main methods used are industrial organization theory, new institutional economics theory, trademark symbol principle, information economics, law economics, the transaction cost economics approach, etc.The contributions of this thesis are as follows. Previous studies of trademark mostly focus on the legal aspects, so the economic analysis of trademark is relatively poor. From the perspective of economics, this paper conducts in-depth study of the relationship between trademark and business-competitive acts and discusses the reasonableness of the existing trademark regulations by using efficiency as standard, which provides a theoretical basis for the revise of Trademark Law.First, trademark will be the introduced into economic analysis as specific assets. Different from previous studies, this paper uses specific assets theory of behavioral economics and transaction cost economics theory to analyze the specific assets of trademark and introduce it into the study of the relationship between trademark and business-competitive acts, it studies specific assets as nature of trademark (property) and its legitimacy, which becomes the important way to analyze corporate behavior. The concept of trademark assets have rich connotation, it should become an important tool for the study of trademark economics and laws.Second, it conducts innovative research on the role of trademark to the competitiveness of enterprises. Competitive behavior can be divided into price and non-price behavior. In respect of trademark and price behavior, it points out that trademark is an important signal of enterprise's quality. Compared the products of trademark assets with products of none- trademark assets, the price of the former is higher, which is also a symbol of product quality. This theory has important significance in practice. When making price regulation policy, it is necessary to carefully analyze the role of trademark assets, which offers a reference model for the price regulation system. It also analyzes the relationship between trademarks and advertising and illuminates the role of enterprise credibility in enterprise competitive mechanism.Third, it makes detail analysis of the role of trademark in monopoly, which existing research involves little. we suggested that a trademark is a means not only competitiveness, but also a tool for corporate monopolies, is a contradictory unity of duality. This study provides a new perspective for people to understand trademark's nature of monopoly and a new idea for trademark regulation. It makes a new interpretation of Chinese way to register well-known trademarks and famous trademark so to build it on a solid theoretical foundation.Fourth, it forwards the principle of trademark's focal point and Optimal number of trademarks for the first time, which has great significance in improving awareness of trademark's limited resources. This means that existing registered trademarks property is not in conformity with the provisions of the efficiency and this has an important instruction function to the next revision of trademark law.Because trademark is an inter-disciplinary and practical area of research, what discussed above is just preliminary. Some parts are still rough that need to be deepened and refined. In addition, there are still many issues yet to be studied, such as how to use the theory of modern economics to analyze the protection of trademark is a subject to be studied further.