Events

Virtual Talk (on invitation)

Laws protecting intellectual property rights balance interests of earlier and later rights holders. The tradeoffs are well established for patents. We argue that similar considerations apply to trademarks. Jurisdictions differ in how strongly they protect earlier rights, with EU trademark law protecting the registered use of an earlier right for much longer than US trademark law. Laws in both jurisdictions seek to eventually align registered use of earlier rights with their actual use, creating space on the trademark register for later rights. Data from a recent reform of trademark fees reveal that registered and actual use of EU marks frequently fail to align as intended. We analyse trademark opposition cases at EUIPO to test whether this creates costs for owners of later rights. We find that a subset of firms relies on the protection afforded to earlier rights to permanently expand the breadth of their marks beyond actual use, limiting access to trademarks for later applicants. We discuss policy implications. (Joint work with Stuart J.H. Graham, Georgia Tech, and Amanda Myers, USPTO)

Contact Person: Fabian Gaessler
 

Organizer: Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, University of Buenos Aires (UBA)

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Room E10

Moderation: Aaron Stumpf

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

We conducted a field experiment to identify the causal effects of extrinsic incentive cues on the sorting and performance of nascent social entrepreneurs. The experiment, carried out with one of the United Kingdom's largest support agencies for social entrepreneurs, encouraged 431 nascent social entrepreneurs to submit a full application for a grant competition that provides cash and in-kind mentorship support through a one-time mailing sent by the agency. The applicants were randomly assigned to one of three groups: one group received a standard mailing that emphasized the intrinsic incentives of the program, or the opportunity to do good (Social treatment), and the other two groups received a mailing that instead emphasized the extrinsic incentives - either the financial rewards (Cash treatment) or the in-kind rewards (Support treatment). Our results show that an emphasis on extrinsic incentives strongly affects who applies for the grant and consequently the type of submissions received. The extrinsic reward cues "crowded out" the more prosocial candidates, leading fewer candidates to apply and fewer applicants targeting disadvantaged groups. Importantly, while the full applications submitted by candidates in the extrinsic incentives groups were more successful in receiving the grant, their social enterprises were less likely to be successful at the end of the one-year grant period. Our results highlight the critical role of intrinsic motives to the selection and performance of social enterprises and suggest that using extrinsic incentives to promote the development of successful social enterprises may backfire in the longer run. (Joint work with Ina Ganguli and Chloé Le Coq)

Contact Person: Dr. Marina Chugunova

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

Despite increasing gender equality across many domains women remain underrepresented in leading positions. In two experiments, we study whether one reason for this gender gap may be that women are less effective in eliciting coordinated support from followers. Both experiments use coordination games, in which a leader must convince followers to select a particular equilibrium. Our first experiment employs a widely used paradigm to study leader effectiveness, the minimum-effort coordination game, while the second uses a novel game to more directly compare the strength of requests from male versus female leaders. While we find, using explicit and implicit attitude measures, that our participants possess stereotypical associations between gender and leadership, we find no evidence that such bias impacts actual leadership performance. We show that this absence of an effect is surprising, relative to the priors of expert researchers (joint work with Eva Ranehill and Roberto Weber).

Contact Person: Dr. Marina Chugunova

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, room 313

When international patent applications are examined sequentially at different patent offices, examiners at following offices may be able to take advantage on the earlier results provided by another office. By way of focusing on rejection citations added by examiners for a set of triadic patent families, this study examines the influence (spillover) of patent examinations across patent offices. Variations over examiners as well as outcome on the applicants’ responses to the examiner disposals will be discussed.

Contact Person: Michael E. Rose

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Room E10

Moderation: Tobias Endrich-Laimböck

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

Recently, a new class of bibliometric indicators has been introduced, which are intended to measure whether a scientific publication is disruptive to a field or tradition of research. Disruptiveness is connected to the ‘scientific revolutions’ concept of Thomas S. Kuhn and refers to exceptional research which is characterized by an overthrow of established thinking. The general approach that all of these indicators build upon is rooted in patent analysis and considers the relations of citing papers and cited references for a given focal paper in the citation network. This seminar will give an overview of the different indicators following this approach and present results that allow a first assessment of whether they measure what they propose to measure. Our results suggest that a modified version of the indicators proposed so far could improve the ability to measure the disruptiveness of papers.

Contact Person: Fabian Gaessler

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Cooperation with Münchner Kartellrechtsforum (Munich Antitrust Law Forum)

Dr. Thorsten Käseberg, LL.M. (NYU) is Head of the Department of Competition and Consumer Policy, Competition Policy Issues in the Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy.


We look forward to seeing you and ask you to register by Tuesday, 21.1.2020, at delia.zirilli(at)ip.mpg.de.