The triangular value of patents

This thesis addresses the question of a patent value from three different angles. It comprises three papers on the patent valuation methods. The patent valuation issues are well-known to the world of research and practice. However, the debates over what the patent contributes to the business and the economy overall remain open. The main contribution of my dissertation is that I present novel ways of addressing the value of patents from both micro- and macroeconomic perspectives. I bridge the theoretical modeling with real-world estimations, which sheds light on the legitimacy of certain hypothetical assumptions in patent valuation.

In the first paper, I develop a factor model to value patents in a corporate patent portfolio. According to the results, the patent value is determined by five factors, such as forward and backward citations, family size, the number of oppositions received, and the number of claims. I contribute to the literature by introducing an interaction of a quantitative measure of a patent value with its qualitative assessment derived from a survey of patent managers. The results show that model estimates are weakly consistent with an expert opinion on the value of patents.

In the second paper, we collaborate with a large multinational company and analyze internal and highly confidential data on product sales, revenues, and other corporate performance measures by tracing each patent down to its product market. To establish causality, we design a randomized controlled trial together with the management of the company, in which some randomly chosen patents are dropped from the portfolio, while others are kept for the duration of the study. To our knowledge, this is the first study that conducts a randomized controlled trial to measure the real market effect of patent protection.

In the third paper, we study whether the regulator expands production possibilities of the economy by assigning a standard-essential status to patents. As we show, the innovators’ risk of losing the standard-setting game ex-ante attenuates the anticipation of a larger market share. Secondly, since the discovery of new technologies is typically slower than the discounting rate for the monopoly profits, standards with a positive contribution to productivity tend to be growth-reducing. Our results have significant policy implications. Regulators impose Fair, Reasonable, And Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) pricing on standard-essential technologies to compensate for the larger market-share the innovators get. We demonstrate how FRAND regulation of mark-ups has an unambiguously negative effect on growth and long-term growth-destroying consequences.