By locking out competition a company can charge higher prices, but those
are not then visible in the profits because of empire building and other
inefficiencies, and tax avoidance. Do read Boldrin and Levine's book -
they are top-level economists, and they go into this sort of thing in
considerable detail.
RepRap was developed for £20,000, incidentally.
Best wishes
Adrian
Dr Adrian Bowyer
http://people.bath.ac.uk/ensab
http://reprap.org
Andrew Chantrill wrote:
> Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't quite see why patents in
> the RP industry necessarily make the products expensive.
>
> If the assumption is that by locking out competition a company can
> charge higher prices, then this should be reflected in their profits.
>
>
> The company that has the most patents in the industry is probably 3D,
> yet as of their last SEC filing they had an accumulated deficit of
> over $81M.
>
> I suspect the reason that RepRap and its various derivatives are less
> expensive is because the development costs are covered elsewhere, and
> because the capabilities of the process are relatively limited.
Received on Tue Jan 05 19:00:35 2010
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