Early Disclosure of Invention and Reduced Duplication: An Empirical Test
利用美国发明人保护法案（AIPA）作为自然实验，实证检验了专利早期披露是否减少了研发重复，并提出了衡量技术竞争的新指标。
Much work on innovation strategy assumes or theorizes that competition in innovation elicits duplication of research and that disclosure decreases such duplication. We validate this empirically using the American Inventors Protection Act (AIPA), three complementary identification strategies, and a new measure of blocked future patent applications. We show that AIPA—intended to reduce duplication, through default disclosure of patent applications 18 months after filing—reduced duplication in the U.S. and European patent systems. The blocking measure provides a clear and micro measure of technological competition that can be aggregated to facilitate the empirical investigation of innovation, firm strategy, and the positive and negative externalities of patenting. This paper was accepted by Joshua Gans, business strategy.