Partisan patent examiners? Exploring the link between the political ideology of patent examiners and patent office outcomes

Abstract

Patents are key strategic resources which enable firms to appropriate innovation returns and prevent rival imitation. Patent examiners – individuals who may be subject to various sources of bias – play a central role in determining which inventions are awarded patent rights. Using a novel dataset, we explore if one increasingly prevalent source of bias – political ideology – manifests in examiner decision-making. Reassuringly, our analysis suggests that the political ideology of patent examiners is largely unrelated to patent office outcomes. However, we do find evidence suggesting politically active conservative-leaning examiners are more likely to grant patents relative to politically active liberal-leaning examiners, but only for patent applications where there is ambiguity regarding what constitutes patentable subject matter and hence examiners have greater discretion.