-In this paper, we address the problem of patent valuation. With this aim in view, we focus on the feasibility and reliability of a patent rating system. This leads us to develop a structural model of patent renewal decisions based on real options that links patent renewals and patent value and to estimate it on micro level data. Results for a sample of European patents show that unobserved het...

This paper reports our experimental results at the NTCIR-6 English Patent Retrieval Subtask. Our previous participation at the patent retrieval Subtask revealed that the long length of the patent applications require less smoothing of the document model than general documents such as news paper articles. We setup the initial baseline retrieval system for U.S. patent applications and compare the...

Patent analysts predict trends in research and the business environment by studying the numbers and classifications of patents issued to companies around the world. Those attempts are often affected by the changes taking place in international treaties, governments, patent laws, patent classification systems, and corporate mergers and acquisitions. This paper describes some of the changes in th...

This paper investigates the effect of the threat and occurrence of patent litigation on the private value of patent protection. Potential challenges are introduced into a renewal model as a factor in patentee decisions as to whether a patent is worth maintaining. The model yields testable predictions about renewal probabilities. Data for post WWII German patents support the hypothesis that the ...

The standard rationale for patent claims is that they describe the invention and provide notice of patent infringement to competitors. This notice theory, however, is simply untrue—because patent litigation is highly unpredictable, claims do not provide notice of infringement. Accordingly, a large literature argues that claims are valueless, and that courts should instead determine patent scope...

A common misconception exists among many scientists and engineers that a patent gives the owner the right to a particular technology. In fact, a patent does not guarantee the right to make or do anything. Instead, a patent gives the patent owner the right to exclude others from making, using, or selling anything that embodies the technology covered by the patent. When multiple organizations own...

In a model with endogenous number of innovating firms, we show that whether patent protection increases R&D investment is ambiguous, and depends on the market demand function and the cost of R&D. If the market size increases with number of firms, patent protection reduces R&D investment if the cost of R&D is sufficiently high, and higher product differentiation increases the possibility of lowe...

Citations from patents to scientific publications provide useful evidence about the commercial impact of academic research but automatically searchable databases are needed to exploit this connection for large scale patent citation evaluations. Google covers multiple different international patent office databases but does not index patent citations or allow automatic searches. In response, thi...

Patent document retrieval, as a recall-orientated search task, does not allow missing relevant patent documents due to the great commercial value of patents and significant costs of processing a patent application or patent infringement case. Thus, it is important to retrieve all possible relevant documents rather than only a small subset of patents from the top ranked results. However, patents...