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Irrational Ignorance At The Patent Office, Michael D. Frakes, Melissa F. Wasserman
Irrational Ignorance At The Patent Office, Michael D. Frakes, Melissa F. Wasserman
Faculty Scholarship
There is widespread belief that the Patent Office issues too many bad patents that impose significant harms on society. At first glance, the solution to the patent quality crisis seems straightforward: give patent examiners more time to review applications so they grant patents only to those inventions that deserve them. Yet the answer to the harms of invalid patents may not be that easy. It is possible that the Patent Office is, as Mark Lemley famously wrote, “rationally ignorant.” In Rational Ignorance at the Patent Office, Lemley argued that because so few patents are economically significant, it makes sense to …
Procrastination In The Workplace: Evidence From The U.S. Patent Office, Michael D. Frakes, Melissa F. Wasserman
Procrastination In The Workplace: Evidence From The U.S. Patent Office, Michael D. Frakes, Melissa F. Wasserman
Faculty Scholarship
Despite much theoretical attention to the concept of procrastination and much exploration of this phenomenon in laboratory settings, there remain few empirical investigations into the practice of procrastination in real world contexts, especially in the workplace. In this paper, we attempt to fill these gaps by exploring procrastination among U.S. patent examiners. We find that nearly half of examiners’ first substantive reports are completed immediately prior to the operable deadlines. Moreover, we find a range of additional empirical markers to support that this “end-loading” of reviews results from a model of procrastination rather than various alternative time-consistent models of behavior. …
Is The Time Allocated To Review Patent Applications Inducing Examiners To Grant Invalid Patents?: Evidence From Micro-Level Application Data, Michael D. Frakes, Melissa F. Wasserman
Is The Time Allocated To Review Patent Applications Inducing Examiners To Grant Invalid Patents?: Evidence From Micro-Level Application Data, Michael D. Frakes, Melissa F. Wasserman
Faculty Scholarship
We explore how examiner behavior is altered by the time allocated for reviewing patent applications. Insufficient examination time may hamper examiner search and rejection efforts, leaving examiners more inclined to grant invalid applications. To test this prediction, we use application-level data to trace the behavior of individual examiners over the course of a series of promotions that carry with them reductions in examination-time allocations. We find evidence demonstrating that such promotions are associated with reductions in examination scrutiny and increases in granting tendencies, as well as evidence that those additional patents being issued on the margin are of below-average quality.