Essays on Innovative Activity and the Protection of Innovations

Angenendt, David Tobias (2019) Essays on Innovative Activity and the Protection of Innovations, [Dissertation thesis], Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna. Dottorato di ricerca in Economics, 31 Ciclo. DOI 10.48676/unibo/amsdottorato/9106.
Documenti full-text disponibili:
[img] Documento PDF (English) - Richiede un lettore di PDF come Xpdf o Adobe Acrobat Reader
Disponibile con Licenza: Salvo eventuali più ampie autorizzazioni dell'autore, la tesi può essere liberamente consultata e può essere effettuato il salvataggio e la stampa di una copia per fini strettamente personali di studio, di ricerca e di insegnamento, con espresso divieto di qualunque utilizzo direttamente o indirettamente commerciale. Ogni altro diritto sul materiale è riservato.
Download (7MB)

Abstract

This dissertation looks at three widely accepted assumptions about how the patent system works: patent documents disclose inventions; this disclosure happens quickly, and patent owners are able to enforce patents. The first chapter estimates the effect of stronger trade secret protection on the number of patented innovations. When firms find it easier to protect business information, there is less need for patent protection, and accordingly less need for the disclosure of technical information that is required by patent law. The novel finding is that when it is easier to keep innovations, there is not only a reduction in the number of patents but also a sizeable reduction in disclosed knowledge per patent. The chapter then shows how this endogeneity of the amount of knowledge per patent can affect the measurement of innovation using patent data. The second chapter develops a game-theoretic model to study how the introduction of fee-shifting in US patent litigation would influence firms’ patenting propensities. When the defeated party to a lawsuit has to bear not only their own cost but also the legal expenditure of the winning party, manufacturing firms in the model unambiguously reduce patenting, with small firms affected the most. For fee-shifting to have the same effect as in Europe, the US legal system would require shifting of a much smaller share of fees. Lessons from European patent litigation may, therefore, have only limited applicability in the US case. The third chapter contains a theoretical analysis of the influence of delayed disclosure of patent applications by the patent office. Such a delay is a feature of most patent systems around the world but has so far not attracted analytical scrutiny. This delay may give firms various kinds of strategic (non-)disclosure incentives when they are competing for more than a single innovation.

Abstract
Tipologia del documento
Tesi di dottorato
Autore
Angenendt, David Tobias
Supervisore
Dottorato di ricerca
Ciclo
31
Coordinatore
Settore disciplinare
Settore concorsuale
Parole chiave
patent protection, trade secrets, patent claims, patent text analysis, patent litigation, fee shifting, patent publication, industrial organization, industrial economics, law and economics, intellectual property
URN:NBN
DOI
10.48676/unibo/amsdottorato/9106
Data di discussione
31 Ottobre 2019
URI

Altri metadati

Statistica sui download

Gestione del documento: Visualizza la tesi

^