Patent Search and Cumulative Innovation

My goal in this chapter is to modify a standard model of cumulative innovation to better account for some of the factors that cause patents (especially outside pharmaceutical technology) to perform badly as property. Bessen and Meurer (Reference Bessen and Meurer 2008) show that patents fail as property in the sense that they deliver small net rewards to innovators (even negative rewards), because they fail to communicate information about patent-based property boundaries to strangers. To lawyers this is known as failure of the notice function of property