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...

Open innovation is the subject of increased scholarly debate. A lot of attention has thereby been paid to firm-centered open innovation, characterized by a for-profit motive and the interplay between patents and contracts, resulting in restricted openness. Inspired by the increasing call for...

Concerns have been raised that the upsurge of 3D printing technology would disrupt the patent system. The central question the present paper aims to address is whether and to what extent the emergence of 3D printing technology indeed urges us to rethink patent law. The paper splits up this...

We discuss various economic aspects of different types (or taxa) of “patent thickets” identified in a companion article co-authored by one of us. We analogize patent thickets to “tangible input thickets” (in which manufacturers of complex products need a large number of different...

Public lawmakers have inadequate and misaligned incentives to engage in legal innovation. Private lawmaking is offered as a potential solution to this problem. However, private lawmaking faces a dilemma: In order to be effective, the cost-reducing standard forms produced by private lawdrafters...

A popular theory is that it may be sufficiently difficult to reach agreement on patent license terms that holdup in development may occur. Early U.S. radio development is widely believed to provide an empirical example of such holdup during 1905-1920, with numerous allegations of an impasse in...

In its recent report entitled “The Evolving IP Marketplace,” the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) advances a far-reaching regulatory approach (Proposal) whose likely effect would be to distort the operation of the intellectual property (IP) marketplace in ways that will hamper the innovation...

At the start of the Industrial Revolution, patentees created many novel and complex transactions to commercialize their property: they maximized their profits through sophisticated agreements that imposed restrictions on manufacturing, sales, and other uses of their inventions. When these...