The number of requests for patent examination showed a significant increase of 83% from 1997 to 2007 in Japan, while the number of patent applications increased by only 1%. This paper aims at theoretically and empirically analyzing the causes of recent "explosion" of examination requests,...

A significant part of the patents held by a firm are not used. We show that, given the uncertainty of invention quality at the patent application stage and the sunk cost incurred for obtaining and developing a patent, the patent (internal) utilization rate declines with the (anticipated) size of...

We examine why cooperation among essential patent holders for a standard may not occur, despite significant gains for patent holders and users of the standard. Utilizing Maskin's (2003) framework, we show that a grand coalition can be implemented only if the number of patent holders (n) is...