At which stage in the production chain should patent licensing takes place? In this paper we show that under realistic circumstances a patent holder would be better off by licensing downstream. This occurs when the licensing revenue can depend on the downstream value of the product either...

Patent trolls appropriate innovation rents by threatening to block other players’ R&D-related value creation. Legal loopholes and inefficiencies in court practice have been identified as drivers of these ‘locking-in-to-extort’ strategies, which might suggest that policy changes can...

Patents have long been regarded as the 'gold standard' of intellectual property protection. In "Little patents and big secrets: managing intellectual property", Anton and Yao (2004) call this traditional view into question by finding that firms keep their most important innovations secret. This...

We develop an index that compares the quality of Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications by considering citations generated by International Search Reports (ISRs). In its most restrictive variation, i.e. excluding citations from the home country and self-citations, the ISR index is not...

This paper utilizes a data set of over 208,000 U.S. patents applied for between 1975 and 2010 to study development of strategic patenting over time and across industries. With received citations as a measure of patent social value, we use data envelopment analysis to estimate firm-level relative...

This paper tests a number of hypotheses on the use and effectiveness of patents and trade secrets designed to protect innovation. While previous studies have often considered patents and trade secrets as substitutes for one another, we investigate the complementary role of the two protection...

Patents should no longer be granted for DNA, but only for new medicinal products, new vaccines and genetic tests which are developed on the basis of DNA. Only in this way, patent law can gain general acceptance in civil and academic society, without losing sight of the interests of the biotech...

Taking into account the relevance of Biotechnology in the World industry and economic growth, this essay is focused on the analysis of the use of biotech patent information for determining technological trends and generating innovation indicators, because patents are an important technological...

The Italian and European regulatory framework for patents would benefit from further improvements in order to foster dynamic competition between Italian firms. At the national level the exclusive allocation of the right to patent inventions to universities, rather than to researchers, would...

In an effort to decompose and adjust patent sales prices for patent portfolio valuation, this study analyzes patent transaction data collected as of September 2012. After presenting the descriptive statistics, the analysis designates a hedonic-model-like specification to identify the value...