EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Patents and the Performance of Voluntary Standard-Setting Organizations

Marc Rysman and Timothy Simcoe ()
Additional contact information
Timothy Simcoe: Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3E6, Canada

Management Science, 2008, vol. 54, issue 11, 1920-1934

Abstract: Voluntary standard-setting organizations (SSOs) are a common feature of systems industries, where firms supply interoperable components for a shared technology platform. These institutions promote coordinated innovation by providing a forum for collective decision making and a potential solution to the problem of fragmented and overlapping intellectual property rights. This paper examines the economic and technological significance of SSOs by analyzing the flow of citations to a sample of U.S. patents disclosed during the standard-setting process. Our main results show that the age distribution of SSO patent citations is shifted toward later years (relative to an average patent) and that citations increase substantially following standardization. These results suggest that SSOs identify promising technologies and influence their subsequent adoption.

Keywords: standards; compatibility; platform; intellectual property; patents; cumulative innovation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (142)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.1080.0919 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Patents and the Performance of Voluntary Standard Setting Organizations (2009) Downloads
Working Paper: Patents and Performance of Voluntary Standard Setting Organizations (2006)
Working Paper: Patents and the Performance of Voluntary Standard Setting Organizations (2005) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:54:y:2008:i:11:p:1920-1934

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Management Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:54:y:2008:i:11:p:1920-1934