Per un Pugno di Dollari: A First Look at the Price Elasticity of Patents

Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 588-604, 2007

25 PagesPosted: 22 Jan 2011

See all articles by Gaétan de Rassenfosse

Gaétan de Rassenfosse

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

Bruno van Pottelsberghe de la Potterie

Free University of Brussels - Solvay Business School; Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) - Department of Applied Economics (DULBEA); Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)

Multiple version icon There are3 versions of this paper

Date Written: October 7, 2007

Abstract

This paper analyses the role of patent-filing fees requested by the member states of the European Patent Convention (EPC). We provide first empirical evidence showing that the fee elasticity of the demand for priority applications is negative and significant. Given the strong variation in absolute fees and in fees per capita across countries, this result indicates a suboptimal treatment of inventors across European countries and suggests that fees should be considered as an integral part of an intellectual property policy, especially in the current context of worrying backlogs. In addition, we show that the transfer rate of domestic priority filings to the European Patent Office (EPO) increases with the duration of membership to the EPO and the GDP per capita of a country, suggesting that member states experience a learning curve within the EPC. The high heterogeneity in the transfer rates casts some doubts on the practice that consists in relying on filings at the EPO or at the United States Patent and Trademark Office to assess the innovative performance of countries.

Keywords: fees, patent filing, price elasticity

JEL Classification: O30, O31, O38, O57

Suggested Citation:Suggested Citation

de Rassenfosse, Gaétan and van Pottelsberghe de la Potterie, Bruno, Per un Pugno di Dollari: A First Look at the Price Elasticity of Patents (October 7, 2007). Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 588-604, 2007 , Available at SSRN:https://ssrn.com/abstract=1743840 orhttp://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1743840

Gaétan De Rassenfosse (Contact Author)

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) (email )

Station 5
Odyssea 1.04
1015 Lausanne, CH-1015
Switzerland

Bruno Van Pottelsberghe de la Potterie

Free University of Brussels - Solvay Business School

50 Avenue Roosevelt
Brussels 1050
Belgium

Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) - Department of Applied Economics (DULBEA) (email )

Ave. Franklin D Roosevelt 50
Brussels, B-1050
Belgium

Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)

London
United Kingdom

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