We investigate incidence and evolution of patent thickets. Our empirical analysis is based on a theoretical model of patenting in complex and discrete technologies. The model captures how competition for patent portfolios and complementarity of patents affect patenting incentives. We show that...

We analyze the duration of the patent examination process at the European Patent Office (EPO). Our data contain information related to the patent's economic and technical relevance, EPO capacity and workload as well as novel citation measures which are derived from the EPO's search reports. In...

Post-grant validity challenges at patent offices rely on the private initiative of third parties to correct mistakes made by patent offices. We hypothesize that incentives to bring post-grant validity challenges are reduced when many firms benefit from revocation of a patent and when firms are...

The number of patent applications filed at the Chinese State Intellectual Property Office SIPO grew tremendously over the last decades and the SIPO has become the world's third largest patent office by 2009. In this paper, we provide an overview of the institutional background of patent...

Patent-based measures are frequently used as indicators in empirical research on innovation and technology as well as on firms' strategies and organizational choices to characterize inventions or, more generally, innovative activities and the technological capabilities of organizations. A clear...

The literature on organizational learning asserts that external learning is often limited geographically and technologically. We scrutinize to what extent organizations acquire external knowledge by accessing external knowledge repositories. We argue that professional service firms (PSFs) grant...

Firms commonly run field experiments to improve their freemium pricing schemes. However, they often lack a framework for analysis that goes beyond directly measurable outcomes and focuses on longer term profit. We aim to fill this gap by structuring existing knowledge on freemium pricing into a...

Most econometric analyses of patent data rely on regression methods using a parametric form of the predictor for modeling the dependence of the response given certain covariates. These methods often lack the capability of identifying non-linear relationships between dependent and independent...

Herbert Zech, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, fällt insgesamt ein positives Urteil zum Patentschutz: Er ermögliche technische Innovation in Bereichen, in denen sich Entwicklungsaktivitäten wegen leichter Nachahmbarkeit und hohen Investitionsbedarfs ansonsten nicht lohnen würden....

Markush structures are molecular skeletons containing not only specific atoms but also placeholders to represent broad sets of chemical (sub)structures. As genus claims, they allow a vast number of compounds to be claimed in a patent application without having to specify every single chemical...