Empirical evidence on the interaction between regular patent and second tier patent systems in advanced economies is almost non-existent. This paper studies how the abolition of the Dutch short-term patent system in June 2008 was related with the patent filing activity at the Dutch patent...

We examine the role of utility models (UM) in patent filing strategies. With an extensive patent family data from European countries, we explore the structures and characteristics of patent families, which include UMs. A simple typology of patent families with UM members is introduced. We...

Despite the wide use of two-tiered patent systems (patents and utility models (UMs)), there is little empirical evidence about how often UMs are actually used, what kind of firms use them to protect their intellectual property, and how firms rank them relative to patents. We offer such an...