The decision of firms to renew their patents is largely assumed to be the result of a careful valuation exercise to balance their expected revenues with renewal fees. This article extends this line of reasoning to all patent applications filed to the EPO over a 20 years period and analyzes with...

It has long been implicitly assumed that the roaring backlogs experienced by most patent offices around the world – and harshly criticized by many patentees – are a mere mechanical consequence of surging numbers of patent filings. However, different voices suggest that the patent system may...

The length of patent rights is an issue of considerable importance in the design of patent systems, and its optimality has been intensively discussed in the literature. This dimension – taking the form of the number of years during which a given patent has been maintained – has been...

Given the growing size of patent databases and portfolios, scholars and practitioners alike need metrics to help them in weighting patent counts or in ranking patents to focus on the most important ones. The main objective of this paper is to help them in this task with a practical and...