Measuring Patent Assessment Quality - Analyzing the Degree and Kind of (In)Consistency in Patent Offices' Decision Making

52 Pages Posted: 7 Feb 2006

See all articles by Paul F. Burke

Paul F. Burke

University of Technology Sydney (UTS) - School of Marketing

Markus G. Reitzig

University of Vienna

Date Written: January 2007

Abstract

We argue that consistent decision making in judging a patent's validity and basing this on its underlying technological quality are important elements of patent office service ("assessment") quality. To understand which level of assessment quality patent offices (can) provide, particularly in new technological areas, we study the concordance of the European Patent Office's granting and opposition decisions for individual patents. Using the biotechnology industry in the 1980s (an emerging patenting area then) as an example, we find that the EPO hardly maximized or optimized assessment quality as far as can be told from bibliographic indicators. We discuss research limitations and consequences.

Keywords: Patents, quality, novelty, inventive step, discrete choice, variance decomposition

JEL Classification: C25, C51, K41, L00, L20

Suggested Citation

Burke, Paul F. and Reitzig, Markus G., Measuring Patent Assessment Quality - Analyzing the Degree and Kind of (In)Consistency in Patent Offices' Decision Making (January 2007). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=880705 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.880705

Paul F. Burke

University of Technology Sydney (UTS) - School of Marketing ( email )

P.O. Box 123
Broadway, NSW 2007
Australia

Markus G. Reitzig (Contact Author)

University of Vienna ( email )

Bruenner Strasse 72
Vienna, Vienna 1090
Austria

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