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...

Summary 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...

There has been a wide-spread misconception based on the imprecise wording of Art. 52 of the European Patent Convention that the protection of business methods by patents is prohibited in Europe. This article investigates the legal framework set by patent laws with respect to the patentability of...

Recent studies of outlaw communities provide qualitative evidence of their existence and the organisation of the underlying innovation processes. We provide descriptive results from a large scale survey of two online outlaw communities focussing on Microsoft's XBox (a gaming console). Based on...

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...

We analyze the duration of patent examination at the European Patent Office (EPO). Our data contain variables that are correlates of the applicants’ and examiners’ assessments of a patent’s economic and technical relevance as well as ex post-application citation measures which indicate the...

We examine the effect of patenting on the survival prospects of 356 internet-related firms that IPO'd at the height of the stock market bubble of the late 1990s. By March 2005, nearly 2/3 of these firms had delisted from the NASDAQ exchange. Although changes in the legal environment in the US in...

We investigate incidence and evolution of patent thickets. Our empirical analysis is based on a theoretical model of patenting in complex and discrete technologies. The model captures how competition for patent portfolios and complementarity of patents affect patenting incentives. We show that...