Doctoral Dissertation Research: Patent Policy Changes in the Court: A study of Heterogeneous Impacts on Business Models and Firms' Participation

由于需要以越来越快的速度适应新技术，司法部门已成为美国专利政策变化的主要来源。自上世纪80年代以来，在另外两个政府部门设定的相对静态的框架内，法院对法律纠纷的裁决不断改变着美国专利的强度。与此同时，专利强度对创新的影响仍存在争议。由于难以理解专利政策各个方面的影响，这场辩论受到了阻碍。本项目提供了一个解决方案，通过(1)区分分析中的三个优势方面：可专利性、广度和排除能力；(2)检查这些法院判决对企业创新活动的速度和方向的异质影响，促进我们对法院如何塑造专利制度的理解。该研究回答了以下三个问题。首先，什么会影响最高法院与专利相关的判决？第二，公司是否会对法院所期望的方向作出反应？最后，企业是否从参与决策中受益？因此，该项目还提供了关于法院决策过程的新见解，重点关注决策中的制约因素和外部影响，包括公司为其立场辩护的动机。此外，本项目还提供了对看似不相关的案例对整体创新速度和方向的总体影响的理解。第一部分以2000年至2015年期间美国最高法院所有专利案件为基础，考察了法院的政策制定过程，以了解利益相关者（作为案件当事人、非当事人或通过游说）的参与对改变专利强度的决定的影响。第二部分提供了长期争论的专利强度与创新之间关系的理论和实证见解。它挑战了“弱专利导致少创新”的观点。为了对抗现有文献中预测企业战略变化导致创新增加或减少的理论，我们使用混合方法，将法院文件的分析与使用专利和企业数据的面板数据集对影响的定量估计相结合，以检查专利政策制定和企业战略背后的机制。最后，第三部分考察了参与专利政策制定的企业是否获得了反映在其绩效上的利益。对于该项目的所有三个部分，提供了关于专利政策制定和企业战略背后机制的强有力的经验证据。一个原始的研究设计被用来估计专利政策变化对企业行为的影响，同时控制对影响的竞争解释。该项目还依赖于独特的数据，这是一个详尽的面板数据集，将专利与整个法国公司的时间序列数据相匹配，基于唯一标识符，从1995年到2014年。这些数据通过区分创新活动参与强度对专利使用倾向的影响，以及确定企业组建和首次参与创新活动的人口水平证据，提供了新的见解。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The need to accommodate new technologies at an increasingly fast pace has led the judicial branch to become a key source of changes in patent policy in the United States. Since the 1980s, within a relatively static framework set by the two other branches of government, courts' rulings on legal disputes have continuously changed the strength of patents in the US. Meanwhile, there is still controversy regarding the impact of the strength of patents on innovation. The debate has been stymied by difficulties in understanding the effect of various facets of patent policy. This project offers a solution to advance our understanding of how courts shape the patent system by (1) distinguishing three aspects of strength in the analysis: patentability, breadth and ability to exclude and (2) examining the heterogeneous impact of these court decisions on the rate and direction of firms' innovative activities. The research answers the following three questions. First, what influences decision-making for patent-related Supreme Court decisions? Second, do firms react to decisions in the direction expected by the Court? Lastly, do firms benefit from participating in policymaking? As a result, the project also provides new insights on the policymaking process by the courts, focusing on the constraints and external influences in decision-making, including firms' incentives to advocate for their position. In addition, this project provides an understanding of the aggregated effect of apparently disjointed cases on the overall rate and direction of innovation. The first part examines the policymaking process in the court based on all US Supreme Court patent cases over the period 2000-2015 to provide an understanding of the effect of participation of stakeholders (as party in a case, amici or through lobbying) on the decisions that change patent strength. The second part provides theoretical and empirical insights on the long-debated relationship between patent strength and innovation. It challenges the view that weaker patents lead to fewer innovations. To confront theories in the existing literature predicting changes in firm strategy leading to both increases and decreases in innovation, mixed methodology is used by combining the analysis of court documents with quantitative estimations of the impact using a panel data set of patent and firm data to examine the mechanisms behind patent policymaking and firm strategy. Lastly, the third part examines whether firms participating in patent policymaking obtain benefits reflected in their performance. For all three parts of the project, strong empirical evidence is provided regarding the mechanisms behind patent policymaking and firm strategy. An original research design is used to estimate the impact of a patent policy change on firms' behavior while controlling for competing explanations for the effects. The project also relies on unique data, an exhaustive panel data set matching patents with time series firm-level data on the entire population of French firms, based on unique identifiers, over the period of 1995-2014. Such data allow novel insights by distinguishing impacts on propensity to use patents from intensity of engagement in innovative activities and identifying population level evidence on firm formation and first-time involvement in innovative activities.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.