The number of patent applications filed at the Chinese State Intellectual Property Office SIPO grew tremendously over the last decades and the SIPO has become the world’s third largest patent office by 2009. In this paper, we provide an overview of the institutional background of patent...

This paper provides an overview of the institutional background of patent examination and its duration in China. The number of patent applications filed at the Chinese State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) has grown tremendously in recent decades; by 2009, SIPO had become the world's third...

Against the background of growing media interest in professional soccer, this paper proposes a moral hazard model with costly state verification to explain how rule changes affecting the reward scheme of team performance impact on the success of managerial change. As has been shown recently...

We analyze the duration and outcomes of patent examination at the European Patent Office utilizing an unusually rich data set covering a random sample of 215,265 applications filed between 1982 and 1998. In our empirical analysis, we distinguish between three groups of determinants: applicant...

Post-grant validity challenges at patent offices rely on the private initiative of third parties to correct mistakes made by patent offices. We hypothesize that incentives to bring post-grant validity challenges are reduced when many firms benefit from revocation of a patent and when firms are...

Firms commonly run field experiments to improve their freemium pricing schemes. However, they often lack a framework for analysis that goes beyond directly measurable outcomes and focuses on longer term profit. We aim to fill this gap by structuring existing knowledge on freemium pricing into a...

Most econometric analyses of patent data rely on regression methods using a parametric form of the predictor for modeling the dependence of the response given certain covariates. These methods often lack the capability of identifying non-linear relationships between dependent and independent...

Computer programming is complex and all personality factors might influence it. Personality factors are comprehensive but broad and, therefore, lower level traits may help understanding the influence of personality on computer programming. The objective of this paper is to extend the empirical...

Kaum eine Fragestellung hat in der Finanzierungsliteratur der vergangenen Jahrzehnte eine sostarke und nachhaltige Beachtung gefunden, wie die der optimalen Kapitalstruktur vonUnternehmen. Der theoretische Literaturzweig ist weitgehend ausgereift und lässt sich imwesentlichen in zwei Lager...

Recent research argues that the management of intangible assets is a key to firms’ longtermsuccess and requires specialized management techniques and a distinctive set ofskills (Rivette & Kline 2000, Standfield 2002, Granstrand 1999). It is further arguedthat the active management of firms’...