sufficiently better at judging an idea's value and if it is sufficiently more costly to patent low than high value ideas, VCs … acquire valuable ideas, develop them beyond the level incumbents would have chosen, and use patents to signal their companies …-run performance, but also infl ates their acquisition prices, and lowers their acquirers' overall profits. Patent law usefulness …

motivations to invent, and the actual use and economic value of the patents. …

Patent holders may choose to protect innovations with single patents or to develop portfolios of multiple, related … inventions. We propose a simple decision-making model in which patent-holders may allocate resources to either expanding the … number of related patents or investing in higher value of patents in the portfolio. We estimate the derived value equation …

We study how fragmentation of patent rights ('patent thickets') and the formation of the Court of Appeal for the … Federal Circuit (CAFC) affected the duration of patent disputes, and thus the speed of technology diffusion through licensing …. We develop a model of patent litigation which predicts faster settlement agreements when patent rights are fragmented and …

cumulative innovation. This paper studies the effects of strategic patenting on R&D, patenting and market value in the computer … software industry. We focus on two key aspects: patent portfolio size which affects bargaining power in patent disputes, and … the fragmentation of patent rights ('patent thickets') which increases the transaction costs of enforcement. We develop a …

private economic value of patents. The estimated mean of our patent value distribution is higher than 3 million Euros, the … skewed distribution of patent values. Our measure is significantly correlated with the number of patent citations, references …, claims, and countries in which the patent is applied. Citations explain value as much as the other three indicators combined …

We study the problem of an inventor who brings to the market an innovation that can be legally copied. Imitators may … 'enter' the market by copying the innovation at a cost or by buying from the inventor the knowledge necessary to reproduce … and use the invention. The possibility of contracting affects the need for patent protection. Our results reveal that: (i …

&D) incentives. We examine the characteristics of litigated patents by combining, for the first time, information about patent case …This paper shows that the process of enforcing patent rights both dilutes and distorts Research and Development (R … filings from the US district courts with detailed data from the US Patent and Trademark Office. By comparing filed cases to a …

Using new data on citations to university patents and scientific publications, and measures of distance based on Google … maps, we study how geography affects university knowledge diffusion. We show that knowledge flows from patents are … is larger for patents from public, as compared to private, universities and this is partly explained by the local …

We show that when the researcher’s (observable but not contractible) contribution to innovation is crucial, a covenant …