 Subjective performance of patent examiners, implicit contracts, and self‐funded patent officesCorinne Langinier and Philippe Marcoul () Managerial and Decision Economics, 2019, vol. 40, issue 3, 251-266 Abstract: Self‐funded patent offices should be concerned with patent quality (patents should be granted to only deserving innovations) and quantity (as revenues come from fees paid by applicants). In this context, we investigate what is the impact of the self‐funded constraint on different bonus contracts and how these contracts affect the examiners' incentive to prosecute patent applications. We consider contracts in which a patent office offers bonuses on quantity quotas (explicit contract) and on quality outcome (either an implicit contract or an explicit contract based on a quality proxy). We find that a self‐funded constrained agency should make different organization choices of incentives. For a low quality proxy precision, an agency facing a tight budget operates well with implicit contracts. However, by only relaxing moderately the budget constraint, the agency might be worse off simply because this will preclude implicit contracts. Only very large patenting fees might allow the agency to compensate for the loss of implicit contracts. Date: 2019 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:mgtdec:v:40:y:2019:i:3:p:251-266 Access Statistics for this article Managerial and Decision Economics is currently edited by Antony Dnes More articles in Managerial and Decision Economics from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
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