information about cooperative licensing and the timing of patent allowances (the administrative event when patent rights are … significantly increases after patent allowance. Moreover, the impact of the patent system depends on the strategic and institutional … environment in which firms operate. Patent allowance seems to play a particularly important role for technologies with longer …

fertility of an innovation in generating more innovations cannot be observed. The menu of patent scope can be implemented with …It may be advantageous to provide a variety of kinds of patent protection to heterogenous innovations. Innovations … protection in order to be encouraged. We model the problem of designing an optimal patent menu (scope and length) when the …

Does an expansion of patent scope induce more innovative effort by firms? This article provides evidence on this … question by examining firm responses to the Japanese patent reforms of 1988. Interviews with practitioners suggest the reforms … significantly expanded the scope of patent rights in Japan, but that the average response in terms of additional R&D effort and …

How do non-practicing entities ("Patent Trolls") impact innovation and technological progress? Although this question …", who exploit the patent system to extract rents and thereby hurt innovation. We employ unprecedented access to NPE …-derived patent and financial data, as well as a novel model that guides our data analysis. We find that NPEs acquire patents from …

analysis of our testable predictions using pharmaceutical data concerning patents, patent expiration, and outsourcing at …

innovation and international technology transfer in general. The literature suggests that patent protection in a host country … externalities, implies that patent protection may not be the optimal instrument for encouraging innovation in this area, especially … technologies. How will patent protection affect this process? In this paper we first review the evidence on the role of patents for …

This paper studies a simple model of experimentation and innovation. Our analysis suggests that patents may improve the … project to implement. A successful innovation can be copied by other firms. Symmetric equilibria (where actions do not depend … equilibria). In contrast to patents, subsidies to experimentation, research, or innovation cannot typically achieve this …

encouragement of creation and innovation. Optimal policy depends on the quantitative strength of these two forces. We give a …

pharmaceuticals. We challenge this orthodox view and show, to the contrary, that the pace of innovation often is faster in a world …

. The purpose is to document the ways in which patent systems are products of battles over the economic surplus from … innovation. The features of these systems take shape as interests at different points in the production chain seek advantage in …-style patent systems with all their imperfections have come to dominate other methods of encouraging inventive activity. The essays …