We analyze the duration of the patent examination process at the European Patent Office (EPO). Our data contain … information related to the patent's economic and technical relevance, EPO capacity and workload as well as novel citation measures … the patent grant by the examiner or an actual patent grant. Highly cited applications are approved faster by the EPO than …

In a patent thicket licensing provides a mechanism to either avoid or resolve hold-up. Firms' R&D incentives will … ex post licensing to resolve it. Building on a theoretical model of a patent portfolio race, firms' choices of licensing …

simultaneous R&D contests for complementary patents and how they interact with patent portfolios that firms may have acquired … already. We also consider how this interaction and the intensity of the contests depends on the type of patent trade regimes … multiple patent product involves an important hold-up problem that considerably reduces the overall contest effort. …

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 …

' successful patent applications. The last chapter describes sector-level input-output relationships in eleven European economies …

competitors. The paper examines the capacity for decentralised patent-based incentive mechanisms to result in socially optimal … incompatibility between the dynamics of the patent system and the dynamics of the resistance problem under both types of evolution …. Under scale-dependent evolution, the externalities within a patent-based system indicate that decentralised mechanisms will …

's principal-agent structure following privatization, and incentives to invest in R&D and to patent. We compare the pre and post …

which German patent renewal fees were paid to full-term expiration in 1995. A search of subsequent U.S. and German patents … allowed to expire before their full term. The higher an invention's economic value estimate was, the more the relevant patent …

We explore the tail of patented invention value distributions by using value estimates obtained directly from patent …