Patent Races with Secrecy
研究了企业为何不总是申请专利而选择保密，发现当专利倾向较小时，加强专利保护反而会降低创新激励，即使这会增加专利申请量。
Firms do not always patent their innovations. Instead, they often rely on secrecy to appropriate the returns of innovations. This paper endogenizes firms’ patent propensity, and shows that when the equilibrium patent propensity is small, strengthening patent protection can decrease firms’ incentive to innovate. Paradoxically, this result holds precisely when a stronger patent policy induces more patent applications. Also, these results can arise even in the simplest patent race model with independent innovations as well as with complementary innovations.