Empirical studies on patent systems and innovation

This dissertation consists of three empirical studies on patents and patenting. The first paper asks why the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issues weak patents that fail to meet the patentability criteria of novelty and non-obviousness. The second paper focuses on the problem of patent evaluation and proposes a novel metric for evaluating patents. The third paper studies the impacts of intellectual property protection on getting access to research tools by academic biological researchers.;In the first paper, "Why Weak Patents? Rational Ignorance or Pro-'Customer' Tilt?" I find evidence that US examiners' behavior indicates that they, during examinations, are able to identify a substantial portion of those issued patents that are relatively weak. The issuance of weak patents appears to be more strongly attributable to the pro-applicant policies and procedures of the USPTO than to US examiners' "rational ignorance" associated with a cost conscious patent office.;In the second paper, "Evaluating Patents by Reading into Their Examiners' Minds", I introduce a simple integrated framework that evaluates patents along two dimensions: patent strength and commercial significance. I then propose a novel metric for evaluating patents, derived from examiners' behavior in prior art search. For a sample of US patents that also filed applications at the European Patent Office (EPO), the metric significantly explains the probability of receiving a patent at the EPO and the likelihood of being renewed at the USPTO, suggesting that it is a good indicator for both patent strength and commercial significance.;I conclude with a third paper, "Patents v. Patenting: Implications of Intellectual Property Protection for Biological Research," co-authored with Brian Wright and Rakhi Juneja. This paper is based on a survey of academic agricultural biologists regarding the increasing problem of getting access to needed research tools. Challenging the emerging consensus that frames this issue as access to "material vs. intellectual property," we find that proliferation of intellectual property protection has a strongly negative effect on research. The problem is not patents or competition or material property rights, per se, but patenting, as an academic institutional imperative in this post-Bayh-Dole era.