The wild frontier
Michael Frakes & Melissa Wasserman
Stanford Law Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many believe the root cause of the patent system’s dysfunction is that the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (PTO or Agency) is issuing too many invalid patents that unnecessarily drain consumer welfare. Concerns regarding the Agency’s over-granting tendencies have recently spurred the Supreme Court to take a renewed interest in substantive patent law and have driven Congress to enact the first major patent reform act in over sixty years. Policymakers, however, have been modifying the system in an effort to increase patent quality in the dark. As there exists little to no compelling empirical evidence the PTO is actually over-granting patents, lawmakers are left trying to fix the patent system without even understanding the root causes of the system’s shortcomings. This Article begins to rectify this deficiency, advancing the conversation along two dimensions. First, it provides a novel theoretical source for a granting bias on the part of the Agency, positing that the inability of the PTO to finally reject a patent application may create an incentive for a resource-constrained Agency to allow additional patents. Second, this Article attempts to explore, through a sophisticated natural-experiment framework, whether the Agency is in fact acting on this incentive and over-granting patents. Our findings suggest that the PTO is biased towards allowing patents. Moreover, our results suggest the PTO is targeting its over-granting tendencies towards those patents from which it stands to benefit the most through allowing. Our findings not only provide policymakers with much needed evidence that the PTO is indeed granting too many invalid patents but also provide policymakers with the first empirical evidence that the Agency’s workload woes are biasing the PTO towards allowing patents. Our results also suggest that the literature has overlooked a substantial source of Agency bias and hence recent fixes to improve patent quality will not achieve their desired outcome of extinguishing the PTO’s over-granting proclivities.
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P-Curve and Effect Size: Correcting for Publication Bias Using Only Significant Results
Leif Nelson, Uri Simonsohn & Joseph Simmons
University of Pennsylvania Working Paper, April 2014
Abstract:
Journals tend to publish only statistically significant evidence, creating a scientific record that markedly overstates the size of effects. We provide a new tool that corrects for this bias without requiring access to nonsignificant results. It capitalizes on the fact that the distribution of significant p-values, p-curve, is a function of the true underlying effect. Researchers armed only with sample sizes and test results of the published findings can correct for publication bias. We validate the technique with simulations and by re-analyzing data from the Many-Labs Replication project. We demonstrate p-curve can arrive at inferences opposite that of existing tools by re-analyzing the meta-analysis of the “choice overload” literature.
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The Political Development of Scientific Capacity in the United States
Andrew Kelly
Studies in American Political Development, April 2014, Pages 1-25
Abstract:
When well directed, science is the greatest agency for the welfare of mankind. John Wesley Powell, the director of the United States Geological Survey (USGS), delivered this message to Congress in 1884. The purpose of Powell's testimony to Congress was not to argue for the erection of an organizational framework for American science, but to defend the one that had been put in place decades earlier. At the time of Powell's testimony, the United States had already begun to assume the mantle of the greatest scientific nation on the planet. “I have studied the question closely,” declared W. H. Smyth, the president of the Royal Geographical Society of London, “and do not hesitate to pronounce the conviction that though the Americans were last in the field, they have, per saltum, leaped into the very front of the rank.” The organizational structure at the heart of America's rapid scientific rise was initially constructed by scientists serving in the nineteenth-century American bureaucracy — by men like John W. Powell. Often seen as a source of state incapacity, in this instance, the federal bureaucracy was the most important force in American scientific development.
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Annamaria Conti & Christopher Liu
NBER Working Paper, April 2014
Abstract:
Considerable attention has been focused, in recent years, on the role that graduate and postdoc students play in the production of academic knowledge. Using data from the MIT Department of Biology for the period 1970-2000, we analyze the evolution over time of four fundamental aspects of their productivity: i) training duration; ii) time to a first publication; iii) productivity over the training period; and iv) collaboration with other scientists. We identified four main trends that are common to graduate students and postdocs. First, training periods have increased for later cohorts of graduate and postdoc students. Second, later cohorts tend to publish their initial first-author article later than the earlier cohorts. Third, they produce fewer first-author publications. Finally, collaborations with other scientists, as measured by the number of coauthors on a paper, have increased. This increase is driven by collaborations with scientists external to a trainee’s laboratory. We interpret these results in light of the following two paradigms: the increased burden of knowledge that later generations of scientists face and the limited availability of permanent academic positions.
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The “Nasty Effect:” Online Incivility and Risk Perceptions of Emerging Technologies
Ashley Anderson et al.
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, April 2014, Pages 373–387
Abstract:
Uncivil discourse is a growing concern in American rhetoric, and this trend has expanded beyond traditional media to online sources, such as audience comments. Using an experiment given to a sample representative of the U.S. population, we examine the effects of online incivility on perceptions toward a particular issue — namely, an emerging technology, nanotechnology. We found that exposure to uncivil blog comments can polarize risk perceptions of nanotechnology along the lines of religiosity and issue support.
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Narratives of Science Outreach in Elite Contexts of Academic Science
David Johnson, Elaine Howard Ecklund & Anne Lincoln
Science Communication, February 2014, Pages 81-105
Abstract:
Using data from interviews with 133 physicists and biologists working at elite research universities in the United States, we analyze narratives of outreach. We identify discipline-specific barriers to outreach and gender-specific rationales for commitment. Physicists view outreach as outside of the scientific role and a possible threat to reputation. Biologists assign greater value to outreach, but their perceptions of the public inhibit commitment. Finally, women are more likely than men to participate in outreach, a commitment that often results in peer-based informal sanctions. The study reveals how the cultural properties of disciplines, including the status of women, shape the meaning and experience of science outreach.
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Kory Kroft & Devin Pope
Journal of Labor Economics, April 2014, Pages 259-303
Abstract:
Since the seminal work of Stigler in 1962, economists have recognized that information is costly to acquire and leads to “search frictions.” Growth in online search has lowered the cost of information acquisition. We analyze the expansion of the website Craigslist, which allows users to post job and housing ads. Exploiting the sharp geographic and temporal variation in the availability of online search induced by Craigslist, we produce three key findings: Craigslist significantly lowered classified job advertisements in newspapers, caused a significant reduction in the apartment and house rental vacancy rate, and had no effect on the unemployment rate.
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Learning from (Failed) Replications: Cognitive Load Manipulations and Charitable Giving
Judd Kessler & Stephan Meier
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, June 2014, Pages 10–13
Abstract:
Replication of empirical studies is much more than a tool to police the field. Failed replications force us to recognize that seemingly arbitrary design features may impact results in important ways. We describe a study that used a cognitive load manipulation to investigate the role of the deliberative system in charitable giving and a set of failed replications of that study. While the original study showed large and statistically significant results, we failed to replicate using the same protocol and the same subject pool. After the first failed replication, we hypothesized that the order our study was taken in a set of unrelated studies in a laboratory session generated the differences in effects. Three more replication attempts supported this hypothesis. The study demonstrates the importance of replication in advancing our understanding of the mechanisms driving a particular result and it questions the robustness of results established by cognitive load tests.
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Entrepreneurial innovations and taxation
Andreas Haufler, Pehr-Johan Norbäck & Lars Persson
Journal of Public Economics, May 2014, Pages 13–31
Abstract:
Stimulating entrepreneurship is high on the policy agenda of many countries. We study the effects of tax policies on entrepreneurs’ choice of riskiness (or quality) of an innovation project, and on their mode of commercializing the innovation (market entry versus sale). Limited loss offset provisions in the tax system induce entrepreneurs innovating for entry to choose projects with inefficiently little risk. The same distortion does not arise when entrepreneurs sell their innovation in a competitive bidding process to an incumbent before the uncertainty is revealed. Tax systems which systematically favor market entry of entrepreneurs can thus lead to welfare losses due to inefficient quality choices, despite leading to more competition in the product market.
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Intellectual Property Rights, the Pool of Knowledge, and Innovation
Joseph Stiglitz
NBER Working Paper, March 2014
Abstract:
The pace of innovation is related both to the level of investment in innovation and the pool of knowledge from which innovators can draw. Both of these are endogenous: Investments in innovations are affected by the pool of knowledge and the ability of firms to appropriate the returns to their innovative activity, itself affected by the intellectual property rights (IPR) regime. But as each firm engages in research, it both contributes to the pool, and takes out from it. The strength and design of IPR affects the extent to which any innovation adds to or subtracts from the pool of ideas that are available to be commercially exploited, i.e. to the technological opportunities. We construct the simplest possible general model to explore the resulting dynamics, showing that, under plausible conditions, stronger intellectual property rights may lead to a lower pace of innovation, and more generally, that long run effects may be the opposite of the short run effects.
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Software Obviousness: The Disconnect between Engineers and the Patent System
Robert Purvy
Google Working Paper, February 2014
Abstract:
Software engineers overwhelmingly dislike software patents and consider nearly all of them obvious. Are they correct, or do they simply not understand the law? To answer this, we look at obviousness law in an industry whose practitioners generally accept and value patents: pharmaceuticals, and ask if there are legal principles there which should be applied to software more frequently. The author, a software engineer, argues that "obvious to try," a principle well understood in the context of pharmaceutical patents, is ripe for appropriation in the software patent context. Several cases are explored to illustrate how the concept of "obvious to try" could be applied to fit the reality of how computer science actually works.
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What is the Probability of Receiving a US Patent?
Michael Carley, Deepak Hegde & Alan Marco
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Working Paper, December 2013
Abstract:
We follow the prosecution histories of the 2.15 million new patent applications filed at the US Patent and Trademark Office between 1996 and 2005 to calculate patent allowance rates. 55.8% of the applications emerged as patents without using continuation procedures to spawn related applications. The success rate of applications decreased substantially from 1996 to 2005, particularly for applications in the “Drugs and Medical Instruments” and “Computers and Communications” fields. We discuss the policy implications of our findings.
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Kevin Steensma, Mukund Chari & Ralph Heidl
Strategic Management Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Expansive patent portfolios may be used by firms to fence off technological space for commercialization, impede the commercialization efforts of competitors, and enhance bargaining power in cross-licensing negotiations. Low quality patents with claims that overlap those of other patents contribute to these portfolios and patent strategies. By failing to disclose known relevant prior art during the patenting process, inventors and their firms may be granted low quality patents with intellectual property claims which would not otherwise have been granted. We find that the failure of inventors to disclose known relevant prior art increases as they gain experience with the patenting process. Such failure is also greater among inventors employed by relatively small, poorly performing firms that rely on outsourced legal counsel during the application process.
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Digital dark matter and the economic contribution of Apache
Shane Greenstein & Frank Nagle
Research Policy, May 2014, Pages 623–631
Abstract:
Researchers have long hypothesized that research outputs from government, university, and private company R&D contribute to economic growth, but these contributions may be difficult to measure when they take a non-pecuniary form. The growth of networking devices and the Internet in the 1990s and 2000s magnified these challenges, as illustrated by the deployment of the descendent of the NCSA HTTPd server, otherwise known as Apache. This study asks whether this experience could produce measurement issues in standard productivity analysis, specifically, omission and attribution issues, and, if so, whether the magnitude is large enough to matter. The study develops and analyzes a novel data set consisting of a 1% sample of all outward-facing web servers used in the United States. We find that use of Apache potentially accounts for a mismeasurement of somewhere between $2 billion and $12 billion, which equates to between 1.3% and 8.7% of the stock of prepackaged software in private fixed investment in the United States and a very high rate of return to the original federal investment in the Internet. We argue that these findings point to a large potential undercounting of the rate of return from IT spillovers from the invention of the Internet. The findings also suggest a large potential undercounting of “digital dark matter” in general.
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Information Technology and the Distribution of Inventive Activity
Chris Forman, Avi Goldfarb & Shane Greenstein
NBER Working Paper, April 2014
Abstract:
We examine the relationship between the diffusion of advanced internet technology and the geographic concentration of invention, as measured by patents. First, we show that patenting became more concentrated from the early 1990s to the early 2000s and, similarly, that counties that were leaders in patenting in the early 1990s produced relatively more patents by the early 2000s. Second, we compare the extent of invention in counties that were leaders in internet adoption to those that were not. We see little difference in the growth rate of patenting between leaders and laggards in internet adoption, on average. However, we find that the rate of patent growth was faster among counties who were not leaders in patenting in the early 1990s but were leaders in internet adoption by 2000, suggesting that the internet helped stem the trend towards more geographic concentration. We show that these results are largely driven by patents filed by distant collaborators rather than non-collaborative patents or patents by non-distant collaborators, suggesting low cost long-distance digital communication as a potential mechanism.
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Identifying the Effect of Open Access on Citations Using a Panel of Science Journals
Mark McCabe & Christopher Snyder
Economic Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
An open-access journal allows free online access to its articles, obtaining revenue from fees charged to submitting authors or from institutional support. Using panel data on science journals, we are able to circumvent problems plaguing previous studies of the impact of open access on citations. In contrast to the huge effects found in these previous studies, we find a more modest effect: moving from paid to open access increases cites by 8% on average in our sample. The benefit is concentrated among top-ranked journals. In fact, open access causes a statistically significant reduction in cites to the bottom-ranked journals in our sample, leading us to conjecture that open access may intensify competition among articles for readers' attention, generating losers as well as winners.
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Quantifying Some of the Impacts of Economics Blogs
David McKenzie & Berk Özler
Economic Development and Cultural Change, April 2014, Pages 567-597
Abstract:
Economics blogs represent a significant change in the way research on development economics is discussed and disseminated, yet little is known about the impact of this new medium. Using surveys of development researchers and practitioners, along with experimental and nonexperimental techniques, we try to quantify some of the blogs’ effects. We find that links from blogs cause a striking increase in the number of abstract views and downloads of economics papers. Furthermore, blogging raises the profile of the blogger and changes readers’ perceptions about his or her institution. Finally, we find some suggestive evidence that a blog can increase knowledge of the topics it covers for the average, but not the marginal, reader.
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Proximity effects on the dynamics and outcomes of scientific collaborations
Felichism Kabo et al.
Research Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper uses path overlap, an innovative measure of functional proximity, to examine how physical space shaped the formation and success of scientific collaborations among the occupants of two academic research buildings. We use research administration data on human subject protection, animal use management, and grant funding applications to construct new measures of collaboration formation and success. The “functional zones” investigators occupy in their buildings are defined by the shortest walking paths among assigned laboratory and office spaces, and the nearest elevators, stairs, and restrooms. When two investigators traverse paths with greater overlap, both their propensity to form new collaborations and to win grant funding for their joint work increase. This effect is robust across two very differently configured buildings. Implications for scientific collaboration and the design and allocation of research space are considered.
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Technological dynamics and social capability: US states and European nations
Jan Fagerberg, Maryann Feldman & Martin Srholec
Journal of Economic Geography, March 2014, Pages 313-337
Abstract:
This article analyzes factors shaping technological capabilities in USA and European countries, and shows that the differences between the two continents in this respect are much smaller than commonly assumed. The analysis demonstrates a tendency toward convergence in technological capabilities for the sample as a whole between 1998 and 2008. The results indicate that social capabilities, such as well-developed public knowledge infrastructure, an egalitarian distribution of income, a participatory democracy and prevalence of public safety condition the growth of technological capabilities. Possible effects of other factors, such as agglomeration, urbanization, industrial specialization, migration and knowledge spillovers are also considered.