IPR Policies and Membership in Standard Setting Organizations: A Social Network Analysis

Whereas technical standards and Standard Setting Organizations (SSOs) are omnipresent and essential to mass production and mass communications, relatively little is formally known about the propensity of firms to belong to certain SSOs. This paper uses a social network analysis technique to empirically analyze the behavior of market participants and their propensities to belong to SSOs. We concentrate our study on standard setting organizations features and their intellectual property rights (IPR) policies such as licensing rules, disclosure requirements, as well as the features of the decision process of standards. Using data on more than 1060 member firms as participants in 28 SSOs, we are able to uniquely graph the membership of firms in SSOs by highlighting some important characteristics. Finally, a multinomial logit regression analysis studies the propensities of firms to belong to four SSOs and member firms’ network communities.