In recent years, juries in some patent infringement suits have awarded prevailing patentees "reasonable royalty" damages in the eight-, nine-, and even ten-figure range. Though not all of these awards have been upheld following postjudgment motions or on appeal, concern over the magnitude and...

This paper describes a data set built to analyze patent litigation in the United States during 1929-2006. The data include all patents in published district court and appellate court decisions in which validity and/or infringement are at issue. We collect numerous patent-specific variables and...

We build a model of innovation and patent adjudication under two forms of uncertainty; uncertainty regarding whether the original invention merits protection (non-obviousness), and uncertainty as to whether a particular competitor's product should be barred (infringement). We find that when it...

Recent patent policy emphasizes the superiority of ex ante licensing over ex post patent assertion. Ex ante means before costs are sunk by a patent defendant, so licensing at this stage avoids the leveraging of a defendant’s investments in product design which is a presumptive aspect of...

The current approach for determining when courts should award injunctions in patent disputes involves a myopic focus on the hardships an injunction might impose on the litigants and the public. This article demonstrates, however, that courts sometimes could rely instead on a consideration far...

We propose a model that integrates a series of events regarding patent rights based on real option framework. After the incumbent has acquired a patent, it can be infringed by the challenger, and the conflict between them can be resolved via litigation or settlement with endogenously determined...

This is a survey of economic analysis of law, that is, of the emerging field under which the standard tools of microeconomics are employed to identify the effects of legal rules and their social desirability. Five basic subject areas are covered. The first is legal liability for harm. Here we...