sufficiently better at judging an idea's value and if it is sufficiently more costly to patent low than high value ideas, VCs …-run performance, but also infl ates their acquisition prices, and lowers their acquirers' overall profits. Patent law usefulness …

software industry. We focus on two key aspects: patent portfolio size which affects bargaining power in patent disputes, and … the fragmentation of patent rights ('patent thickets') which increases the transaction costs of enforcement. We develop a …

This paper develops a methodology to compare the quality of examination services across patent offices. Quality is … defined as the extent to which patent offices comply with their patentability conditions in a transparent way. The methodology … patent offices in Europe (EPO), Japan (JPO) and the US (USPTO) shows that their operational designs differ substantially: the …

This paper examines patent protection in an endogenous-growth model. Our aim is two-fold. First, we show how the patent … policies discussed by the recent patent-design literature can influence R&D in the endogenous-growth framework, where the role … of the patent-design literature. In a general-equilibrium model, both incentives to innovate and monopoly distortions …

This paper investigates whether patent fee policies are a potential factor underlying the boom in patent applications … observed in major patent offices. We provide the first panel-based evidence suggesting that fees affect the demand for patents … in three major patent offices (EPO, USPTO and JPO), with a price elasticity of about -0.4 (similar to that of the …

The present paper discusses the role of quality in patent systems from the perspective of patent offices' behavior and … organization. After documenting original stylized facts, the paper presents a model in which patent offices set patent fees and the … quality level of their examination processes. Various objectives of patent offices' governors are considered. We show that the …

This paper presents a quality index for patent systems. The index is composed of nine operational design components … that help shape the transparency of patent systems and affect the extent to which they comply with patentability conditions … two factors measure patent offices’ resource allocation (i.e., workload per examiner and incentives). The index is …

This paper studies how patent rights and price regulation affect how fast new drugs are launched in different countries … duration and content of patent and price control regimes. Price regulation strongly delays launch, while longer and more … extensive patent protection accelerates it. Health policy institutions, and economic and demographic factors that make markets …

innovations by taking more time to perform their reviews. We study the relationship between the length of patent review and the … importance of inventions in a theoretical model. We build a simple model of the US patent review process. The model predicts that …, controlling for a patent's position in the new technology cycle, more important innovations would (and should) be approved more …