The aim of this study is to find the relationship between software intellectual property rights (IPRs) and the performance of software firms in South Korea. In order to measure the performance of software firms, we employed the concept of efficiency of data envelopment analysis (DEA). With measured efficiency, we use tobit regression to investigate which IPR has a stronger effect on efficiency. The empirical results show an obvious tendency: the average efficiency of software firms having any kind of software IPR is higher than that of firms not having them. Moreover, the results of tobit analysis show that both software copyrights and patents have a positive effect on the performance of software firms, and that the effect of patents is higher than that of copyrights.
['Dukrok Suh', 'Junseok Hwang', 'Dong-hyun Oh']
Do Software Intellectual Property Rights Affect the Performance of Firms? Case Study of South Korea