We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
One objective of the patent litigation system is to screen meritorious from non-meritorious patents and invalidate the latter. While much of this screening may occur at trial, some amount of targeting may take place at the time of the filing of the suit itself. In this chapter, we assess the targeting efficiency of the patent litigation system at this earlier filing stage. Should the system indeed screen at this stage, one would predict a higher likelihood of patent lawsuits among a set of patents with weaker underlying validity relative to a set of patents with stronger underlying validity. In prior work (Frakes and Wasserman, Review of Economics and Statistics, 2017), we found that as examiners were given less time to review applications, they granted patents at higher rates, with the resulting marginal patents exhibiting greater markers of invalidity and attracting more litigation. An implication of these findings is that patents with more questionable validity—due to the leniency of the examiner—are indeed more likely to wind up in litigation, a finding supportive of filing-stage screening of meritorious claims. Our analysis in this book chapter attempts to generalize these prior findings to sources of examiner leniency beyond time constraints. More broadly, we characterize an examiner’s leniency by their overall grant rate, taking advantage of the fact that applications are effectively randomized across examiners. Consistent with our prior findings, we find that lenient examiners are more likely, on average, to issue patents with markers suggestive of weaker underlying validity and that are more likely to attract litigation. Ultimately, our findings suggest that legally invalid patents issued by the U.S. Patent Office are substantially more likely to be the target of litigation relative to legally valid patents.
Recommend this
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.