Title: Disharmony in international patent office decisions
Abstract: Despite recent efforts to harmonize international patent law and patent examination protocols, there remain substantive procedural differences in the way in which different patent offices examine a patent application. This means that a patent application may be granted in one jurisdiction but rejected in others, which raises welfare concerns about the ability of patents to provide an ex ante incentive for investment. In this article, we analyze whether there are systematic differences in international patent application outcomes using a dataset of patent applications that have been granted in the US and submitted in Japan and Europe and have a single, common priority application. We then examine how the decisions made by the patent offices vary across different patent characteristics such as technology area, non-obviousness of the invention and priority country. Our results suggest that there is substantial disharmony in international patent application outcomes
Publication Year: 2006
Publication Date: 2006-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 27
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