Title : The determinants of patent notice failure: Empirical evidence using Chinese data
Author(s) : Hua He, Mianqing Wang, Jia Liu, Julien Pénin
Abstract : The quality of patent information is a key element in explaining the effectiveness of patent systems. Patent notice failure is likely to slow down technology diffusion, be the source of innumerable patent disputes, and facilitate patent trolling and anti-commons situations. Theoretical literature has shown that the quality of patent information depends on the nature of the technology, the structure of patent databases and the structure of the patent document. However, to our knowledge, no analysis of these determinants has been carried out empirically. In this article, we investigate the link between patent document structure, and in particular the length of claims and technical description, and the quality of patent information, which we approximate by the number of citations received (forward citations). By analyzing 765,290 Chinese patents over the period 2005-2012, we put forward an inverted-U relationship between independent claim length and technical specification length and the quality of patent information. Furthermore, the results show that this inverted-U relationship is moderated by the number of dependent claims and the number of citations to prior art literature. These results have important implications for the policy and management of patent systems.
Key-words : patent information quality, notice failure, notice externality, patent citations, patent claims, patent trolls.
JEL Classification : O34
