S9 Ep31: How well does patent screening work?
From VoxTalks Economics by VoxTalks
May 29, 2026 · 33 min · Season 9 · Episode 31
About this episode
The episode discusses the effectiveness of patent screening and the implications of errors in the patent system.
Someone once held a patent on the swing. A piece of wood. Two ropes. The US Patent Office granted it. How often does that actually happen, and what does it cost when the system gets it wrong? Or, how often is a valid patent claim rejected? Until now, no one knew. Tim Phillips talks to Mark Schankerman of LSE and CEPR, who with co-authors William Matcham spent eight years building the tools to find out. Using natural language processing across a dataset of around one million patent applications, twenty million claims, and fifty-five million examiner decisions, they measure how similar each incoming claim is to the hundred million claims that preceded it, going back to 1976. They find that 81% of initial patent claims fall below the patentability threshold; examiners must negotiate that figure down round by round. And they do a pretty good job. But around a third of all abandoned applications contain at least one valid claim the system failed to protect. You don’t see patents that aren’t awarded, so those errors have, until now, been invisible. The research behind this episode: Matcham, William, and Mark Schankerman. Forthcoming. "Screening Property Rights for Innovation."…
People in this episode
Host: Tim Phillips
Guest: Mark Schankerman
Topics covered
- patent screening
- innovation
- natural language processing
- patent claims
- US Patent Office
Keywords
- patent
- screening
- claims
- examiners
- natural language processing
- innovation
- LSE
- CEPR
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: LSE, CEPR, Econometrica
Books & works: Screening Property Rights for Innovation
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- S9 Ep28: Immigration and integration in Europe · May 8, 2026 · 25 min
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