Patent trolls appropriate profits from innovation solely by enforcing patents against infringers. They are often … effectively terminate the troll business. In this paper, we shed light on this issue by empirically analyzing trolls patent … acquisitions. We draw on a unique dataset of 392 U.S. patents acquired by known patent trolls between 1997 and 2006, which we …

The literature on patent buyouts has focused on single-economy settings, where buyouts are welfare improving relative … system of global patent protection paired with domestic price subsidies, and only intersovereign transfers can achieve a …