This is a submission of responses by Prof. Colleen Chien to questions for the record posed by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Chris Coons (D-Del.) at a October 30th hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, entitled, "Promoting the Useful Arts: How can...

We present a model of process innovation that offers an explanation for the negative relationship between patent strength and R&D investment. We show that under the popularly used damage rule of reasonable royalties, the innovator might favor imitation. Since imitation is discouraged for strong...

This article argues that effectiveness and legitimacy are two inseparable issues for the success of economic governance systems. Moving beyond the conventional market failure and state failure approaches, the article develops the notion of network governance success, a notion that looks at the...

Patents are a useful but imperfect reward for innovation. In sectors like pharmaceuticals, where monopoly distortions seem particularly severe, there is growing international political pressure to identify alternatives to patents that could lower prices. Innovation prizes and other non-patent...

This paper presents a model of cumulative innovation where firms are heterogeneous in their research ability. We study the optimal reward policy when the quality of the ideas and their subsequent development effort are private information. The optimal assignment of property rights must...

I examine the impact of patent policy — characterized by patent length and strength — on R&D investment dynamics and the number of competitors in the context of sequential innovation. Overly protective policies introduce two distortions: they delay leaders' and followers' investments toward...

This paper introduces a unique historical data set of more than 8,000 British and American innovations at world fairs between 1851 and 1915 to explore the relationship between patents and innovations. The data indicate that the majority of innovations - 89 percent of British exhibits in 1851 -...

In 2014-2015, policymakers made changes to the patent system that were intended to decrease abusive litigation and increase the quality of patents and complaints. The changes included the Octane Fitness & Highmark (fee-shifting, Alice (patentable subject matter), Teva, and Williamson cases...

A weak version of the Porter hypothesis claims that strict environmental policy provides positive innovation incentives, hence triggering improved competitiveness and securing environmental quality. In a comparative way, this paper empirically tests this hypothesis across countries by linking...