. -- heterogeneous inventions ; innovation size ; intellectual property rights ; patents ; patent filing fees ; patentability standards …Patents have long been regarded as the 'gold standard' of intellectual property protection. In "Little patents and big … patenting costs, patentability standards, and the fact that patents provide protection in competitive situations where secrecy …

framework. -- filing fees ; imitation ; innovation ; probabilistic patent rights ; R&D ; simultaneous innovation ; trade secrets …Traditionally patents are seen as the gold standard for intellectual property protection. But, in line with empirical … results on the relation between patenting and innovation size are then confronted with survey data for small European firms …

Patent and trade secret law can be viewed as alternative bodies of law for protecting certain types of inventions … business considerations related to choosing between reliance on patent or trade secret law when the relevant subject matter is …

firms may protect their inventions by means of intellectual property rights, such as patents. By taking out a patent … of patents on the dissemination of R&D findings is, however, insignificant. Therefore, we conclude that patent …From a firm’s perspective two competing forces are driving the decision to invest in innovation. On the one hand …

Licensing in a patent thicket allows firms to either avoid or resolve hold-up. Firms' R&D incentives depend on whether … they license ex ante or ex post. We develop a model of a patent portfolio race, which allows for endogenous R&D efforts, to … likely to avoid patent portfolio races, since the threat of hold-up increases. On the other hand, more valuable technologies …