Screening for Patent Quality: Examination, Fees, and the Courts

We develop an integrated framework to study how governments can improve the
quality of patent screening. We focus on four key policy instruments: patent office examination, pre- and post-grant fees, and challenges in the courts. We show
that there are important complementarities among these instruments, and identify
conditions under which they can be used to achieve either partial or complete
screening. We simulate the model to study the welfare effects of different policy
reforms. We show that intensifying patent office examination, frontloading patent
fees and capping litigation costs all generate welfare gains, while replacing examination with a pure registration system reduces welfare.