Modelling the Duration of Patent Examination at the European Patent Office
Modelling the Duration of Patent Examination at the European Patent Office
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DOI：
10.1287/mnsc.1090.1069
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发表时间：
2005-10
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
D. Harhoff;Stefan Wagner
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
D. Harhoff;Stefan Wagner
我们分析了欧洲专利局（EPO）专利审查过程的持续时间。我们的数据包含与专利的经济和技术相关性、EPO的能力和工作量以及来自EPO检索报告的新引用措施相关的信息。在我们的多变量分析中，我们估计竞争风险规范，以表征导致申请人撤回申请，审查员拒绝专利授权或实际专利授权的过程中的差异。高被引申请比不太重要的申请更快获得EPO的批准，但申请人撤回申请的速度也较低。随着申请的复杂性、独创性、检索报告中的参考文献（反向引用）数量以及申请日EPO的工作量，所有结果的处理时间都会增加。在其他结果中，内源性申请人行为变得明显：更具争议性的申请导致更慢的赠款，但更快的撤回，而相对完善的申请（通过搜索报告中出现的申请人参考资料的高份额来识别）被批准得更快，需要更长的时间才能撤回。
We analyze the duration of the patent examination process at the European Patent Office (EPO). Our data contain information related to the patent’s economic and technical relevance, EPO capacity and workload as well as novel citation measures which are derived from the EPO’s search reports. In our multivariate analysis we estimate competing risk specifications in order to characterize differences in the processes leading to a withdrawal of the application by the applicant, a refusal of the patent grant by the examiner or an actual patent grant. Highly cited applications are approved faster by the EPO than less important ones, but they are also withdrawn less quickly by the applicant. The process duration increases for all outcomes with the application’s complexity, originality, number of references (backward citations) in the search report and with the EPO’s workload at the filing date. Endogenous applicant behavior becomes apparent in other results: more controversial claims lead to slower grants, but faster withdrawals, while relatively well-documented applications (identified by a high share of applicant references appearing in the search report) are approved faster and take longer to be withdrawn.