more technological expertise and investment opportunities acquire more patents. Patent sales are the dominant type of … attention. This paper fills that gap by asking how patent acquisitions interact with firm investment policy. I find that patent … contract and maximize investment incentives; patent licenses frequently contain royalties, which induce under …

Opportunities” panel of the Commercial Function of Patents in Today’s Innovation Economy conference, explores acquired patent … historic exceptions. Second, it suggests ways that acquired patent licensing can have a commercial benefit, even though it is … ensues. First, the cost of finding relevant patents implies that patent owners are in a better position to communicate …

We examine the relation between patent thickets and acquisitions. Patent thickets are dense webs of overlapping … litigation. We find that firms are less likely to be acquired when they are in a denser thicket comprised of many patent owners … it can have these costs imposed on it by the acquirer. Importantly, our results are not explained by patent count, patent …

scholarship on intellectual property, I predict firms will patent more aggressively than otherwise expected when markets for … technology are highly fragmented (i.e., ownership rights to external technologies are widely distributed); this effect should be …

scholarship on intellectual property, I predict firms will patent more aggressively than otherwise expected when markets for … technology are highly fragmented (i.e., ownership rights to external technologies are widely distributed); this effect should be …

Patent trolls appropriate profits from innovation solely by enforcing patents against infringers. They are often … effectively terminate the troll business. In this paper, we shed light on this issue by empirically analyzing trolls patent … acquisitions. We draw on a unique dataset of 392 U.S. patents acquired by known patent trolls between 1997 and 2006, which we …