IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/respol/v54y2025i5s0048733325000344.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Death squad or quality improvement? The impact of introducing post-grant review on U.S. patent legal quality

Author

Listed:
  • Martinelli, Arianna
  • Mazzei, Julia

Abstract

We investigate how the introduction of post-grant reviews at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office through the America Invents Act (AIA) has influenced the behavior of patent applicants and examiners. This reform may incentivize applicants to narrow the scope of their patents, thereby reducing the risk of post-grant reviews and enhancing patent legal quality. To test this hypothesis, we employ a standard Difference-in-Differences (DID) analysis and find that applicants are more likely to narrow the scope of their patents. This change has resulted in fewer challenges to U.S. patents, yielding estimated annual savings of 62 to 148 million. When applicants do not preemptively narrow the scope during filing, we observe tougher scrutiny during the examination process, as examiners effectively compensate for the applicant’s lack of action. However, this “disciplinary effect” of narrowing patent scope is absent in complex fields characterized by patent thickets, where the reform does not lead to significant improvements in U.S. patent legal quality.

Suggested Citation

  • Martinelli, Arianna & Mazzei, Julia, 2025. "Death squad or quality improvement? The impact of introducing post-grant review on U.S. patent legal quality," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 54(5).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:respol:v:54:y:2025:i:5:s0048733325000344
    DOI: 10.1016/j.respol.2025.105205
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733325000344
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.respol.2025.105205?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Patent scope; Post-grant reviews; Policy evaluation; America Invents Act;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • O38 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Government Policy
    • O34 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Intellectual Property and Intellectual Capital
    • K0 - Law and Economics - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:respol:v:54:y:2025:i:5:s0048733325000344. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/respol .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.