Costly Screens and Patent Examination

ECONOMICS PATENT EXAMINATION AND DISGUISED PROTECTION by

This paper proposes a game theory model in which a foreign multinational corporation (MNC) and a domestic firm compete in the domestic market. In this model the domestic patent office could influence the firms’ profit curves by controlling the pendency and grant probability of the MNC’s patents. Hence, patent examination could be used implicitly or explicitly as a tool to protect the domestic f...

The Duration of Patent Examination at the European Patent Office

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 which are derived from the EPO’s search reports. In our multivariate analysis we estimate competing risk specifications in order to characterize differenc...

Information Visualization for Peer Patent Examination

I am assuming here that we are intended to address visualization in particular as opposed to user interface design more generally, although of course the latter subsumes the former. I would like to note that, in my opinion, the proposed user interface mockups are very well done; visually they are professional yet appealing, they transmit a great deal of information with a minimum of clutter, an...

Who Feeds the Trolls? Patent Trolls and the Patent Examination Process

We shed light on the patent-purchasing behavior of non-practicing entities (NPEs) by leveraging random examiner assignment and detailed patent prosecution data. NPEs disproportionately purchase patents issued by lenient examiners, who force fewer edits to claims text and have lower standards for non-obviousness and claim clarity. We then provide additional evidence from European Patent O ce dec...

How Are Patent Cases Resolved? An Empirical Examination of the Adjudication and Settlement of Patent Disputes