摘要
专利市场是经济活动中效率最为低下的市场之一。一方面,专利属于无形资产,很难评判其价值。另一方面,由于信息不对称,市场参与双方(发明人和使用者)均面临很大的搜寻和交易成本。然而较少有文献实证记录这些市场摩擦所带来的后果。本文记录中国个人专利申请的一个特别现象:与企业专利相比,个人专利被广泛认为质量较差;然而另一方面,个人专利在授权后的维持时间却长于企业专利。本文认为专利市场摩擦可以一定程度上解释该现象:由于搜索成本和信息不对称,相对于企业来说,个人发明人需要更长时间才能将其专利许可或转让给可以商业化的公司。个人发明人往往需要这些转让收益来收回发明的投资成本,为此他们会努力寻求潜在的授予方,而不得不维持专利到更长的时间。本文提供一些实证证据来支持这个假说。在专利质量比较过程中,本文基于中国国家知识产权局的数据库,整理并建立了中国专利申请的详细数据并构建了若干质量指标。同时,作者利用谷歌专利数据库补充了专利权利要求项数量和专利引证这两个指标,为中国专利质量分析、知识传递与溢出提供了重要的数据来源。
This paper documents the paradox of Chinese individual patent filings,namely,individual inventors’ patents are widely regarded as of lower quality compared to firm-filed patents;while on the other hand,they are maintained significantly longer than their firm counterpart. We point to the inefficiency of the patent market to explain the paradox: because of the high search cost and information asymmetry,it takes longer time for individuals to license their patents to a potential commercialized firm,without which the individual inventors cannot reap the benefit and cover the investment cost. The individual inventors choose to wait for potential buyers of their invention until the invention becomes almost obsolete.We construct a dataset on Chinese patents for empirical analysis,incorporating crawled data from Google Patents to include the number of claims and citations for the patents,and then match with SIPO data. These two variables will be instrumental in studies that focus on patent quality and knowledge flows. The ex-ante quality measures( claims,number of subclasses,number of inventors,grant lag,grant rate,etc) suggest that the individual patents are of much lower technical quality,compared to the firm or academic patents. These statistics show that individual applications are not simply disguised form of firm applications:they indeed have significantly different quality measures,even conditional on being granted. However,when we look at the ex-post quality measures,we find that individual patents have a much longer life than firm patents: they are on average maintained10 months longer than firm patents! Since the life-in-force has been regarded as one of the most reliable indicators of patent value,the finding constitutes the paradox of the Chinese individual filings,as a large proportion of individual innovators are non-performing entities( NPEs),holding their patents longer means paying maintenance fees without being compensated.We provide an explanation based on the observation that individual innovators,e
作者
孙震
Sun Zhen(Department of Agriculture and Resource Economics, University of California- Berkeley, CA94709, USA)
出处
《科研管理》
CSSCI
CSCD
北大核心
2019年第3期179-187,共9页
Science Research Management
关键词
市场摩擦
专利质量指标
专利维持
market inefficiency
patent quality index
patent maintenance
