Patent Examination and Disguised Protection

This paper proposes a game theory model in which a foreign multinational corporation (MNC) and a domestic firm compete in the domestic market. In this model the domestic patent office could influence the firms’ profit curves by controlling the pendency and grant probability of the MNC’s patents. Hence, patent examination could be used implicitly or explicitly as a tool to protect the domestic firm and help it to catch up or even leapfrog ahead technologically. Numerical simulations are then conducted to identify potential features of such protection and to establish hypotheses for empirical testing using patent data from selected countries.