We survey the empirical literature on non-practicing entity (NPE) litigation behavior and its consequences. We document both aggregate trends and cross-sectional differences amongst various types of NPEs. Survey evidence illustrates a number of ways in which NPEs can potentially act...

A recent and widely received study by Lauren Cohen, Umit G. Gurun, and Scott Duke Kominers finds that non-practicing entities (NPEs) — pejoratively known as “patent trolls” — are “opportunistic” because they target defendants that (1) are cash-rich (particularly compared to...

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 investigate the stability of cooperative relationships between inventors and consequences for the characteristics and patent productivity of the respective regional innovation systems (RIS). The empirical analysis is for nine German regions over a period of 15 years. We find a rather high...

This paper analyzes the consequences of radical patent-regime change by exploiting a natural experiment: the forced adoption of the Prussian patent system in territories annexed after the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. Compared to other German states, Prussia granted patents more restrictively by...

The "tragedy of the commons" metaphor helps explain why people overuse shared resources. However, the recent proliferation of intellectual property rights in biomedical research suggests a different tragedy, an "anticommons" in which people underuse scarce resources because too many owners can...

The role of patent law and patent practice especially in biotech has gained considerable attention of late as there are concerns that innovative efforts are stifled rather than fostered by intellectual property in the area. In this essay we survey some of the difficulties encountered in biotech...

We model “patent privateering”—whereby producing firms sell patents to patent assertion entities (PAEs) which then license them under the threat of litigation—in a bargaining game. PAEs can negotiate higher licensing fees than producing firms, because they cannot be counter-sued for...

We analyze the development of the German knowledge base measured by co-classifications of patents by German inventors and relate this technological development to changes in the structure of the underlying inventor networks. Our central hypothesis states that technologies which become more...