The unintended consequences of crowdsourcing prior art search

Jin-Hyuk Kim and Benjamin Mitra-Kahn

Applied Economics, 2020, vol. 52, issue 24, 2569-2579

Abstract: A pilot programme run by the United States Patent and Trademark Office sought to crowdsource prior art search to help patent examiners examine patent applications in emerging technology areas. By comparing participating patent applications to a control group and using a differential awareness of the programme between domestic and foreign applicants as an instrument, we show that the programme did not have a significant effect on allowance rate, led to more requests for continued examination and boosted forward citations substantially. The programme also increased the patent examiner’s search effort both in terms of the number of search reports filed by the examiners and the number of references added by the examiners after the first office action.

Date: 2020
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DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2019.1693022

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