We study how the market for innovation affects enforcement of patent rights. Conventional wisdom associates the gains … from trade with comparative advantage in manufacturing or marketing. We show that these gains imply that patent … transactions should increase litigation risk. We identify a new source of gains from trade, comparative advantage in patent …

This paper argues that the consequences of the ‘fragmentation’ of the European patent system are more dramatic than the … mere prohibitive costs of maintaining a patent in force in many jurisdictions. First, detailed analysis of judicial systems …-level competition policy and granting authority ultimately facing national jurisdictional primacy on patent issues. These high degrees …

This paper shows that the process of enforcing patent rights both dilutes and distorts Research and Development (R …&D) incentives. We examine the characteristics of litigated patents by combining, for the first time, information about patent case … filings from the US district courts with detailed data from the US Patent and Trademark Office. By comparing filed cases to a …

We study how fragmentation of patent rights ('patent thickets') and the formation of the Court of Appeal for the … Federal Circuit (CAFC) affected the duration of patent disputes, and thus the speed of technology diffusion through licensing …. We develop a model of patent litigation which predicts faster settlement agreements when patent rights are fragmented and …

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 …

We study the determinants of patent suits and their outcomes over the period 1978-99 by linking detailed information … from the U.S. patent office, the federal court system, and industry sources. The probability of being involved in a suit is … patent system generates incentives, net of expected enforcement costs, that differ across inventors. Patentees with a large …

This paper assesses the impact of adopting a post-grant review institution in the US patent system by comparing the … “opposition careers” of European Patent Office (EPO) equivalents of litigated US patents to those of a control group of EPO … employing these different methods in our data analysis. We find that EPO equivalents of US litigated patent applications are …