Veranstaltungen

The patent system underpins the business model of some of the fastest-growing companies. Used appropriately, it should support frontier technologies and nurture new firms. Used perniciously, it can stifle innovation and protect established technological behemoths. We analyze patent examination decisions at the American, European, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese patent offices and find evidence that patent attorneys have a surprisingly significant role in the patent system. Our results suggest that some forces within the examination system maintain the uneven playing field by allocating monopoly rights to inventors with better access to influential attorneys, rather than leveling it by favoring inventors with better, non-obvious ideas. Attorney quality is most important, vis-à-vis invention quality, in less codified and more rapidly changing technology areas such as software and ICT. Moreover, attorney quality is more important when invention quality is low. 

Ansprechpartnerin: Marina Chugunova

We present a comprehensive study on the dynamics of knowledge production and diffusion linked to global mobile inventors (GMIs). We find that GMIs are essential team members of the first few patents in technology classes new to the country of residence as compared to patents filed at later stages. We interpret these results as tangible evidence of GMIs facilitating the technology-specific diffusion of knowledge across nations. (Joint work with Dany Bahar, Brookings Institution, and Prithwiraj Choudhury, Harvard Business School)

Ansprechpartner: Rainer Widmann

This paper analyzes the recognition of women’s innovative ideas. Bibliometric data from research in economics are used to investigate gender biases in citation patterns. Based on deep learning and machine learning techniques, one can (1) establish the similarities between papers (2) build a link between articles by identifying the papers citing, cited and that should be cited. This study finds that, on average, a paper omits almost half of related prior papers. There are, however, substantial heterogeneities among the authors. In fact, omitted papers are 15% to 30% more likely to be female-authored than male-authored. First, the most likely to be omitted are papers written by women (solo, mostly female team) working at mid-tier institutions, publishing in non-top journals. In a group of related papers, the probability of omission of those papers increases by 6 percentage points compared to men in similar affiliation when the citing authors are only males. Overall, for similar papers, having at least one female author reduces the probability of omitting other women’s papers by up to 10 percentage points, whereas having only male authors increases the probability of being omitted by almost 4 percentage points. Second, the omission bias is twice as high in theoretical fields that involve mathematical economics than it is in applied fields such as education and health economics. Third, men benefit twice as much as women from publishing in a top journal, in terms of likelihood of being omitted. Lastly, being omitted with respect to past publications affects future productivity and reduces the probability of getting published in a top journal. Finally, peer effects and more editorial board diversity tend to counteract and reduce the omission bias.

Ansprechpartnerin: Marina Chugunova

Using data from a prominent online platform for launching new digital products, we document that the composition of the platform’s ‘beta testers’ on the day a new product is launched has a systematic and persistent impact on the new product’s success. Specifically, we use word embedding methods to classify products launched on this platform as more or less focused on the needs of women customers, and show that female-focused products launched on a typical day – when the majority of beta testers are male – experience 30% less growth and are 3.5 percentage points less likely to be operating a year after launch. Exploiting exogenous variation in the composition of users who visit the platform we find that this product gender gap shrinks to zero on days when more female beta testers are present on the website, suggesting that it is the composition of early users, rather than unobserved differences in the growth potential of products catering to women, that is driving our results. Our findings highlight the importance of understanding sampling bias in entrepreneurial experiments and how such bias may lead to a dearth of innovations aimed at consumers who are underrepresented among early-users. (Joint work with Rembrand Koning and Ruiqing Cao)

Ansprechpartner: Rainer Widmann

The debate surrounding escalating prescription drug prices has increasingly focused on the legitimacy of the practice of brand-name manufacturers receiving patent protection on peripheral features of the drug such as the route of administration, as opposed to just the active-ingredient itself. The key question is whether these later-obtained, secondary patents protect novel features and represent true innovation or, instead, provide little to no innovative benefit and improperly delay generic entry. In this paper, we explore how the Patent Office may improve the quality of the secondary patents issued – thereby reducing the degree of unnecessary and harmful delays of generic entry – by giving examiners more time to review patent applications. Our findings suggest that current examiner time allocations are causing patent examiners to issue low quality secondary patents on the margin. We further set forth evidence suggesting that the costs to investing in greater ex ante scrutiny of secondary pharmaceutical patent applications by the Patent Office are greatly outweighed by the benefits, which include the avoidance of downstream litigation expenses and gains to consumer and total surplus from reduced drug prices.

Ansprechpartnerin: Lucy Xiaolu Wang

Understanding the factors affecting the direction of innovation is a central aim of research in the economics and strategic management of innovation. Progress on this topic has been inhibited by difficulties in measuring the location and movement of innovation in ideas space. We introduce and explore an approach based on an unassisted machine learning technique, Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (HDP), that flexibly generates categories from a corpus of text and enables calculations of the distance and movement in ideas space. We apply our algorithm to patent abstracts from the period 2000-2018 and demonstrate that, relative to the USPTO taxonomy of patent classes, our algorithm provides a leading indicator of a shift in innovation topics and enables a more precise analysis of movement in ideas space.

Ansprechpartner: Michael E. Rose

This paper analyses the effect of strategic patenting on firm and competitor performance, productivity, innovative output and market concentration. Using a novel definition of strategic patenting, this paper finds a positive effect of strategic patenting on market concentration. The results for the patentee show a positive effect of profit growth, and positive but significantly smaller contribution of strategic patenting to total factor productivity compared to novel technological patents. In contrast, peers suffer from a decrease in total factor productivity, innovative output and both profit and sales growth following strategic patenting by the focal firm. These findings suggest a conflict between patent policies designed to promote innovation while still providing incentives for the firms to capture market share and defend monopolistic positions.

Ansprechpartner: David Heller

In many countries formal, professionally managed establishments have significantly higher productivity than informal work arrangements which are often conducted from home. To understand the impact of these establishments on productivity we use a field experiment in India to test how much of the effect is due to a causal treatment effect versus workers self-sorting into more productive work arrangements. We find a strong positive treatment effect of working from the office, but negative sorting on productivity. Even productive employees choose working from home despite the negative treatment effect, especially if they have domestic responsibility such as child care. The effect is stronger for women and families with children.

Ansprechpartnerin: Marina Chugunova

Studying 5.6 million biomedical science articles published over three decades, we show that controlling for selective attrition reconciles conflicts in a longstanding, interdisciplinary literature. While research quality declines monotonically over the career, this decline is easily overlooked because the highest “ability” authors have the longest publishing careers. Our results have implications for broader questions of human capital accumulation over the career and also for federal research policies that shift funding from late- to early-career researchers – while providing more funding to researchers when they are most creative, these policies must be undertaken carefully because young researchers are less “able” on average.

(Joint work with Huifeng Yu, Gerald Marschke, Matthew B. Ross and Joseph Staudt)

Ansprechpartner: Rainer Widmann