Examiner Characteristics and Patent Office Outcomes

Abstract

In this paper, we show that there are important differences across patentexaminers at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and that theserelate to the most important decision made by the USPTO: whether or not togrant a patent. We find that more experienced examiners, and those whosystematically cite less prior art, are more likely to grant patentapplications. These results are not encouraging as a matter of publicpolicy. But they do point to human resource policies as potentiallyimportant levers in patent system reform.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.