The IEEE-SA updated patent policy and the Business Review Letter issued by the US DoJ have caused much discussion in the US (Sidak, 2015). The purpose of this paper is to assess whether a similarly lenient antitrust approach to Standard Setting Organizations’ (“SSOs”) rate setting policies...

This paper develops a methodology to compare the quality of examination services in different patent offices. Quality is defined as the extent to which patent offices comply with their patentability conditions in a transparent way. The methodology consists of a two-layer analytical framework...

This paper analyses the consequences for the European Patent System (EPS) of the recently ratified London Agreement (LA), which aims to reduce the translation requirements for patent validation procedures in 15 out of 34 national patent offices. The simulations suggest that the cost of patenting...

For more than 40 years, governments and professional associations have acted, voted or lobbied against the implementation of the Community Patent (COMPAT). The econometric results and simulations presented in this paper suggest that, thanks to its attractiveness in terms of market size and a...

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 in several European countries and four case studies...

Intellectual property rights and competition policy are intimately related. In this paper I survey the economic literature analyzing the interaction between intellectual property law and competition law and how the boundary between these two policies is drawn in practice. Recognizing that...

The aim of this paper is to test whether patent-based indicators are still reliable measures of innovativeness in light of organizational changes in the field of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) protection and the regulatory reforms already under way respectively at the U.S. Patent and...

Traditionally patents are seen as the gold standard for intellectual property protection. But, in line with empirical findings that secrecy is considered more important for appropriating returns, recent theories predict that firms keep their most important inventions secret. This article...

Firm acquisitions have been shown to serve as a way to gain access to international markets, technological assets, products or other valuable resources of the target firm. Given this heterogeneity of takeover motivations and the skewness of the distribution of the deal value we show whether and...

Gaining access to technological assets and patents, in particular, has long been a major motive and objective for firm acquisitions. On the one hand, patents are used as a building instrument for the acquirer's technology portfolio. On the other hand, patents can be attractive because of their...