Ryan Lampe
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Economics, Stanford University
Fields: Economics of Innovation, Industrial Organization, Economic History
Curriculum Vitae
Strategic Citation (Job Market Paper)
The candor of patent applicants is an important determinant of patent quality. This paper investigates whether applicants strategically withhold citations to relevant “prior art.” I construct a basic model that predicts that the likelihood of citation is increasing in the value of the applicant's patent and decreasing in the applicant's ability to counter-sue potential challengers. I test these predictions using an exogenous change in United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) policy which allows me to distinguish citations added by applicants from citations added by patent examiners. The data indicate that patentees withhold approximately 18% of relevant citations. Variation in withheld citations is explained by differences in patent value, the size of the applicant's patent portfolio, and the patent's technological category.
Do Patent Pools Encourage Innovation? Evidence from the 19th-Century Sewing-Machine Industry (with Petra Moser)
Regulators favor patent pools as a remedy for overlapping patent grants and excessive litigation. With patent pools, member firms share patents freely with each other and offer one-stop licenses to outside firms. Thus patent pools are expected to encourage innovation by reducing litigation between pool members and lowering transaction costs for outside firms. We examine this prediction at the example of the first patent pool in U.S. history, the Sewing Machine Combination (1856-1877). Our data confirm that member firms patent more in the years leading up to the pool; member firms, however, patent less as soon as the pool is established. To examine whether changes in patenting translate into increases in performance, we measure improvements in the speed of sewing machines through stitches per minute. Performance data suggest that innovation flattened for the duration of the pool and increased again only after the pool had expired. Our data suggest that a patent pool may discourage innovation if it increases the threat of litigation for outside firms.
Patent Pools and Technology Adoption: Evidence from the Sewing Machine Combination, 1856-1877 (with Petra Moser)
Patent pools allow member firms to combine their patents and license the combination of patents as a single package to non-member firms. This paper examines the impact of patent pools on technology adoption in the presence of substitutes. Using the example of the Sewing Machine Combination (1856-1877), we find that the formation of the pool spurred patenting and innovation in a technologically inferior substitute. Nineteenth-century home sewing machines typically sewed one of two stitches: the chain-stitch or the lock-stitch. The chain-stitch was an inferior substitute for the lock-stitch mechanism covered by the pool's patents. Our data show that patents granted to chain-stitch machines increased dramatically after the pool was formed and that firms were more likely to enter the sewing-machine industry with chain-stitch machines during the lifetime of the pool. Firms that entered with the inferior chain-stitch technology faced a greater risk of exit.
The Economics of Patent Design: A Selective Survey (with Anthony Niblett)
Renewal Fees and Self-Funding Patent Offices (with Joshua Gans and Stephen P. King), Topics in Theoretical Economics, 2004, v. 4: No. 1, Article 6.
Network Externalities, Price Discrimination and Profitable Piracy (with Stephen P. King), Information Economics and Policy, September 2003, v. 15, pp. 271-90.
