Patents and trade secrets are often considered economic substitutes. Under this view, inventors can decide either to maintain an invention as a trade secret or seek a patent and disclose to the public the details of the invention. However, a handful of scholars have recognized that because the...

A surprisingly small amount of empirical research has been focused on the process of obtaining a patent grant from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). The purpose of this document is to describe the Patent Examination Dataset (PatEX), make a large amount of information from the...

A surprisingly small amount of empirical research has been focused on the process of obtaining a patent grant from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). One major reason for this lack of research has been the paucity of readily-available data on the examination of applications....

A surprisingly small amount of empirical research has been focused on the process of obtaining a patent grant from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). The purpose of this document is to describe the Patent Examination Dataset (PatEX), make a large amount of information from the...

Previously, we introduced the concept of “data-generating patents,” which are patented inventions that by design produce valuable data through their operation or use. When holders of data-generating patents possess market power over the patented invention, they often indirectly enjoy market...

This new version of the Patent Examination Research Dataset (PatEx) is based on data that the Office of the Chief Economist downloaded from Patent Examination Data System (PEDS) on April 26, 2020. We parsed the XML and organized the data into the familiar PatEx data files, following the...

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...

While the traditional literature and the policy statements concerning standardization as such emphasize the benefits of standardization, the intellectual property and competition law literature and policymaking has been more critical of standardization. Intellectual property is relevant, as the...

To understand why some patents get licensed and others do not we estimate a portfolio of firm- and patent-level determinants for why a particular licensor's patent was licensed over all technologically similar patents held by other licensors. Using data for licensed biopharmaceutical patents, we...

We study the impact of Standard Setting Organization (SSO) intellectual property rights (IPR) policies on standardization and innovation. Specifically, we conduct a pair of event studies for two well known IPR policy revisions: a switch from Fair Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) to...