Chair of Prof. Stefan Bechtold (IP Group)
The Intellectual Property Group at the Center for Law & Economics at ETH Zurich studies how intellectual property, law & technology – including Internet law, AI & Law, privacy law, and telecommunications law – and antitrust law shape innovation, markets, and institutional governance in the digital age.
Although these fields are central to contemporary innovation policy, their theoretical foundations and real-world effects remain deeply contested. The Intellectual Property Group addresses this challenge by using advanced social science methods to address pressing questions in current intellectual property, law & technology, and antitrust debates. In close collaboration with economists, computer scientists, and data scientists, the group conducts large-scale data analyses, experimental laboratory studies, online experiments, field experiments, and qualitative interview studies to understand how legal rules influence human and firm behavior and to draw policy conclusions on the optimal design of intellectual property and digital market regulation. The group explores how to regulate the digital economy at scale, and how advances in artificial intelligence are reshaping foundational concepts of intellectual property law and market regulation more generally.
The Intellectual Property Group co-organizes the Workshop & Lecture Series on the Law & Economics of Innovation, which regularly brings internationally leading scholars to Zurich.
Main research areas of the Intellectual Property Group include:
Intellectual Property and Human Behavior
Lawyers, economists, and psychologists have long developed theories of creativity, innovation, and intellectual property protection. Current models of intellectual property protection rely on assumptions about how inventors, creators, and artists interact with the legal system and how their activities respond to incentives. Using observational studies and experiments in the lab, the field, and on the Internet, the Intellectual Property Group empirically evaluates, refines, and challenges these assumptions in order to inform our understanding of the purposes and limits of intellectual property law.
Regulating Digital Markets at Scale
A defining challenge of the digital economy is that millions of firms interact with millions or even billions of users across global platforms. Governing such ecosystems at scale creates profound challenges for legal institutions. The Intellectual Property Group studies how digital market regulation affects compliance, competition, and global data markets. Jointly with computer scientists, the group develops automated tools to observe and measure regulatory environments online, allowing the empirical study of how law operates in large-scale digital markets in practice, and how private and public governance mechanisms interact in these markets.
Automation and the Transformation of Legal Systems
The rise of artificial intelligence raises fundamental questions for legal and institutional design. The Intellectual Property Group conducts experiments to study how laypeople and experts interact with artificial intelligence systems. It examines how machine-learning systems challenge core assumptions of intellectual property theory and legal decision-making. In collaboration with data scientists, the group builds natural language processing systems to analyze and predict decisions in intellectual property, contract law, privacy law, and beyond. This opens new avenues for empirically studying legal institutions and rethinking how legal systems operate as creative activity, regulatory processes, and human decision-making become increasingly automated.
For more information on the research interests of individual group members, please click here.