may even reduce welfare. The reason is that it crowds our proprietary innovation, which on net may reduce total innovation …

clauses would reduce such excessive, signaling-driven investment and patenting intensity. … sufficiently better at judging an idea's value and if it is sufficiently more costly to patent low than high value ideas, VCs …' high value to acquirers prior to exiting. This increases the VC-backed companies' patenting intensity and long …

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

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

A few recent contributions have claimed that in high-tech industries—where innovation is often cumulative and products … include many components which are protected by patents in the hands of many different patent holders—the cost of obtaining all … royalty stacking problem to exist: (a) innovation must be cumulative, so that the patents are complementary; (b) there must be …

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

A large portion of innovators do not patent their inventions. This is a relative puzzle since innovators are often … and can account for the differences across sectors in the propensity to patent. Surprisingly, in general, the protection …

We construct a competitive model of innovation and growth under constant returns to scale. Previous models of growth … under constant returns cannot model technological innovation. Current models of endogenous innovation rely on the interplay … innovation and sees the non-rivalrous nature of ideas as a natural conduit to increasing returns. The results here challenge the …

innovations by taking more time to perform their reviews. We study the relationship between the length of patent review and the … importance of inventions in a theoretical model. We build a simple model of the US patent review process. The model predicts that …, controlling for a patent's position in the new technology cycle, more important innovations would (and should) be approved more …