There is no global patent that will secure protection for an invention globally, and as the title of the book Global Patents: Limits of Transnational Enforcement (Oxford University Press, 2012) suggests, holders of national patents have a limited ability to enforce their patents across national...

We survey the economic literature, both theoretical and empirical, on the choice of intellectual property protection by firms. Our focus is on the tradeoffs between using patents and disclosing versus the use of secrecy, although we also look briefly at the use of other means of formal...