A SURVEY OF THE ECONOMICS OF PATENT SYSTEMS AND PROCEDURES

The last several decades have seen increases in patenting activity worldwide, as well as growing issues related to patent quality. In response to these quality issues a recent patent literature has emerged, that investigates the behavior and incentives of patent examiners, applicants, and third parties. In this paper, we provide an overview of patent procedures, patent systems and a survey of the new economic literature on patent systems. Both theoretical and empirical papers are considered. Policy implications coming from this literature are presented.     

Subjective performance of patent examiners,implicit contracts,and self‐funded patent offices

Self‐funded patent offices should be concerned with patent quality (patents should be granted to only deserving innovations) and quantity (as revenues come from fees paid by applicants). In this context, we investigate what is the impact of the self‐funded constraint on different bonus contracts and how these contracts affect the examiners' incentive to prosecute patent applications. We consider contracts in which a patent office offers bonuses on quantity quotas (explicit contract) and on quality outcome (either an implicit contract or an explicit contract based on a quality proxy). We find that a self‐funded constrained agency should make different organization choices of incentives. For a low quality proxy precision, an agency facing a tight budget operates well with implicit contracts. However, by only relaxing moderately the budget constraint, the agency might be worse off simply because this will preclude implicit contracts. Only very large patenting fees might allow the agency to compensate for the loss of implicit contracts.     

Are patent fees effective at weeding out low‐quality patents?

The paper investigates whether patent fees are an effective mechanism to deter the filing of low‐quality patent applications. The study analyzes the effect on patent quality of the Patent Law Amendment Act of 1982, which resulted in a substantial increase in patenting fees at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Results from a series of difference‐in‐differences regressions suggest that the increase in fees led to a weeding out of low‐quality patents. About 10% of patents in the lowest quality decile were filtered out, with the effect concentrated in the patents of firms whose overall patent portfolio was medium to large (more than 20 patents). The study has strong policy implications in the current context of concerns about declines in patent quality.     

微软公司在华专利布局研究

跨国公司是国外在华申请专利的主体,跨国公司申请的专利质量较高,并且大部分为发明专利。随着我国专利事业的飞速发展,专利已经成为占领市场的重要手段和策略。本文通过对微软公司在华的专利布局情况进行分析,对申请量、授权量、法律状态、集中领域等问题进行研究,总结跨国公司在华专利战略的特点,并对我国企业提出发展建议。     

对外担保会影响审计费用与审计意见吗？

以2007—2013年间沪深A股上市公司为样本，考察公司对外担保的情况，并分析了上市公司当年对外担保对其审计费用和审计意见的影响。结果表明：存在对外担保的公司会被收取更高的审计费用，且对外担保的规模越大，审计费用也越高；存在高风险担保的上市公司被出具非标准审计意见的概率相对较高。进一步研究发现，当上市公司为国有时，其对外担保事项影响审计费用的程度较之非国有企业更大；东部沿海地区上市公司相对于其他地区上市公司，其对外担保事项对审计费用的影响更大。     

董事高管责任保险与审计费用增加:监督、激励还是纵容?——基于中国A股经验数据的实证研究

董事高管责任保险的引入引起审计费用显著增加,既可能是监督、激励效应所致,也可能是机会主义行为所致,研究清楚到底是哪一种原因导致审计费用增加,对认识董事高管责任保险的治理职能、加强公司治理机制建设等均具有重要意义。基于沪深交易所上市公司2003—2017年的数据,实证检验了董事高管责任保险对审计费用的影响。研究发现,董事高管责任保险的引入将显著增加上市公司的审计费用支出,且审计费用支出的增加是因为保险人积极履行监督行为、追求更高的审计质量所引起的,而非是其引致的机会主义行为所导致的。进一步研究发现,董事高管责任保险与审计费用之间存在显著的正向交互效应,即在较差的外部治理环境中董事高管责任保险的监督激励效应更为显著。这一研究对董事高管责任保险与审计费用的关系有了全新的认识,也为董事高管责任保险的推广提供了经验支持。     

Development of patent roadmap based on technology roadmap by analyzing patterns of patent development

Recently, patent forecasting and planning has been emphasized as an essential process in the strategic management of technology because well-planned patents will make larger profits and occupy dominant positions first. Thus, this paper aims to suggest the concept and process of a patent roadmap based on a technology roadmap and patterns of patent development. For this, first, ontology of technology is generated to structure the characteristics of technology based on the existing technology roadmap and then patents are collected from a patent database. Second, collected patents are grouped by similarities based on vectors of extracted keywords and grouping results are classified by TEMPEST. In this step, keywords extracted from the previous phase are matched with TEMPEST individually and patent groups are categorized in accordance with high relevance between representative keywords in patent groups and core keywords in each category of TEMPEST. Third, the patterns of patent development are identified for each patent group and categorized by two types – structural and temporal patterns. Consequently, extracted patterns serve as evidence of patent planning, and the patent roadmap is drawn with the technology layer composed of the technology roadmap and the patent layer that each group is mapped on. The proposed approach is illustrated by the case of the transparent AMOLED display. The patent roadmap will enable managers to establish patenting strategies in order to achieve a valuable core patent that has the potential to become a business model, yielding good returns in the long term.     

企业盈余管理行为对审计收费的影响——基于2010年上市公司的数据分析

自上市公司的审计费用成为要求公布的信息以来,大量的学者开始研究审计收费的影响因素问题,以试图为我国审计收费的合理定价提供理论依据。审计费用的影响因素有很多,本文主要基于盈余管理对审计费用的影响方面进行研究。在控制相关影响审计收费变量的基础上,通过利用统计分析软件对2010年上市公司的数据进行分析发现:上市公司的盈余管理的程度与审计费用存在着正相关的关系;盈余管理的程度越高,审计收费就越高。     

DEFERRED FEES FOR UNIVERSITIES

Each English university should be allowed to introduce its own ‘deferred fees’ on top of the existing national funding structure. Each graduate would only have to pay these fees to its university if their income rises beyond the point of paying off their maintenance and state tuition loans. I show these new fees are fiscally neutral, highly progressive and have no impact on the state or the financial position of the universities which do not introduce such fees. They have the potential to provide a long‐run solution to the repeated underfunding of undergraduate education at a number of English universities and reduce the fiscal pressure the state is under.     

Application fee manipulations in matching markets

In some well-known hospital–intern type of matching markets, hospitals impose mandatory application fees on internship applicants to consider their applications. Motivated by this real-life phenomenon, we study the application fee overreporting incentives of hospitals in centralized matching markets by assuming that interns have finite budgets to spend on such fees. Our main theorem shows that no stable mechanism is immune to application fee manipulations. Interestingly, under any stable rule, hospitals might not only obtain better matchings but also increase their application fee revenues through overreporting their application fees. In the restricted domains in which either side has homogeneous preferences or each hospital has only one available position, every stable mechanism turns out to be immune to application fee overreportings.     

企业专利质量提升的关键问题研究

对于中国整体专利申请量和授权量的飙升,国内外褒贬不一。在庞大的专利数量中,企业的贡献最大。我国2012年授权的有效发明专利中企业所占比重已达57．9％,但企业创新力与国外相比存在较大的差距。本文从专利的产品特性角度对提升我国企业专利质量水平展开研究,提出了必须提升对专利质量的认知水平、必须健全专利质量体系和必须以市场需求为导向提升专利质量水平的对策建议。     

商业模式创新与审计收费——基于线上销售的视角

考察企业线上销售这一商业模式创新对审计收费的影响，基于2009—2020年我国全部A股上市公司的年报数据，利用Python语言构建企业开展线上销售的度量指标，实证研究发现,企业开展线上销售会使得审计收费显著增加,该结论在经过一系列稳健性检验后仍然成立。从机制检验结果来看，线上销售增加了审计风险，导致审计师采取更多的应对措施，从而提高了审计收费。异质性分析结果表明，“四大”事务所、具有行业专长以及具有较高信息技术水平的审计师审计会削弱线上销售对审计收费的正向影响。总之，厘清了线上销售这一商业模式创新对上市公司审计收费的影响及作用机制，加深了关于商业模式创新对企业经营及审计行为影响的认识，同时也为推动审计行业转型发展提供了有益启示。     

Patent indicators for macroeconomic growth—the value of patents estimated by export volume

This paper examines the linkage between patenting and export performance for selected countries at the level of technology fields. Some empirical studies show considerable correlation between the patenting behavior of countries and their economic success in international markets. Adding to the existing literature, the aim of this analysis is to assess whether the indicators that are supposed to reflect patent value—such as patent citations or family size—have any explanatory power in estimating the export value of countries by technology fields.     

PATENT ENFORCEMENT: A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

Without the confidence that patent rights can be enforced quickly and efficiently, when needed, the patent system will not stimulate innovation. For this reason, governments, academics, international institutions and the private sector have poured significant resources into gathering and analysing statistics on patent enforcement over the last two decades. This paper reviews these studies and finds that while infringement is relatively common, much enforcement occurs informally and less than 1–2% of patents incur litigation. New strategic uses of the enforcement system, especially by nonpracticing entities, are the major emerging enforcement issue, especially in the United States. While the old problem of litigation costs attracts the lion's share of empirical attention, it has produced remarkably few solutions to date.     

Dynamics between patent latent variables and patent price

This paper focuses on studying the relationship between patent latent variables and patent price. From the existing literature, seven patent latent variables, namely age, generality, originality, foreign filings, technology field, forward citations, and backward citations were identified as having an influence on patent value. We used Ocean Tomo's patent auction price data in this study. We transformed the price and the predictor variables (excluding the dummy variables) to its logarithmic value. The OLS estimates revealed that forward citations and foreign filings were positively correlated to price. Both the variables jointly explained 14.79% of the variance in patent pricing. We did not find sufficient evidence to come up with any definite conclusions on the relationship between price and the variables such as age, technology field, generality, backward citations and originality. The Heckman two-stage sample selection model was used to test for selection bias.     

自愿性会计政策变更、审计费用与审计意见——基于A股上市公司数据的研究

以2011—2015年A股上市公司为样本，研究自愿性会计政策变更对审计意见和审计费用的影响。研究发现：自愿性会计政策变更利润影响数与非标准审计意见显著正相关，但较高的审计费用会降低自愿性会计政策变更利润影响数与非标准审计意见之间的相关性。进一步区分变更性质和产权性质后发现：发生恶意会计政策变更的企业、国有企业更易发生审计意见购买行为。     

INTERCHANGE FEES IN PAYMENT CARD SYSTEMS: A SURVEY OF THE LITERATURE

Abstract This paper surveys the recent literature about interchange fees in payment card systems. Interchange fees are used by payment platforms to allocate the total cost of a payment card transaction between the cardholder's bank, the issuer, and the merchant's bank, the acquirer. Each time a consumer pays by card, its bank receives an interchange fee from the merchants' bank. Banks argue that interchange fees are needed to encourage the use of electronic payment instruments, whereas merchants claim that they artificially inflate the cost of accepting cards. This paper sheds light on the ongoing debate that opposes banks to the regulatory institutions or the competition authorities in various countries, by reviewing the theoretical results of the literature and highlighting some unanswered issues.     

开发支出资本化、内部控制与审计收费——基于企业异质性特征的实证检验

以2007—2018年沪深A股上市公司为样本，研究了开发支出资本化对审计收费的影响以及内部控制对开发支出资本化与审计收费关系的调节作用，并从产权性质和是否高新技术企业的企业异质性特征角度进行了分组检验。研究发现，存在开发支出资本化的公司会被收取更高的审计费用，高质量内部控制能够负向调节开发支出资本化对审计收费的影响，非国有控股公司和高新技术企业内部控制的负向调节作用更强。研究结果说明审计师在对上市公司进行审计时，充分考虑了开发支出资本化存在的风险以及内部控制的负向调节作用，并将其作为影响审计收费的重要因素。     

雾霾污染对审计费用和审计质量的影响研究

以2013—2017年沪深两市A股上市公司为研究样本，实证分析了雾霾污染对会计师事务所审计费用和审计质量的不同影响。研究结果表明：雾霾污染会导致审计费用增加和审计质量下降。这一结论在替换雾霾污染指标、改变雾霾污染衡量方式、替换雾霾污染数据、替换审计质量指标、替换控制变量、采用极端天气比例、考虑雾霾污染的预期效应和采用倾向得分匹配方法等稳健性检验后依然成立。进一步分析发现：雾霾污染会通过增大企业经营风险和企业问题曝光风险来提高审计费用；雾霾污染会通过减少审计师的审计时间来降低审计质量；审计费用溢价增强了雾霾污染对审计质量的负向影响；雾霾污染对审计费用的正向影响和对审计质量的负向影响仅在非重污染企业样本中和非重污染地区样本中显著成立。研究结论有助于厘清雾霾污染影响审计行为的作用机制，为主管部门在雾霾污染环境中加强审计市场监管提供理论依据。