Optimal patent renewals

Cornelli, Francesca and Schankerman, Mark ORCID: 0009-0006-1071-7672 (1996) Optimal patent renewals. . Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, London, UK.

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Abstract

When firms have different R&D productivities, it may be welfare increasing to differentiate patent lives across inventions. The reason is that any uniform patent life provides excessive incentives to do R&D to the low productivity firms and insufficient incentives to the high productivity firms. Such a differentiated scheme is implementable through renewal fees, which endogenously determine an optimal pattern of patent lives. We characterise the optimal pattern of patent life-spans and show how it depends on key features of the economic environment, such as the degree of heterogeneity in R&D productivity across firms, the ability of patentees to appropriate the potential rents generated by R&D and the learning process about the value of the innovation. We illustrate the potential welfare gains associated with optimal renewal schemes through simulation analysis.

Item Type:	Monograph (Discussion Paper)
Official URL:	http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/
Additional Information:	© 1996 Francesca Cornelli and Mark Schankerman
Divisions:	Economics STICERD
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor K Law > K Law (General)
Date Deposited:	05 Mar 2008 14:40
Last Modified:	11 Dec 2024 18:22
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/3734

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