RT journal article
T1 Effects of knowledge spillovers between competitors on patent quality: what patent citations reveal about a global duopoly
A1 Acosta Seró, Manuel
A1 Coronado Guerrero, Daniel
A1 Ferrándiz León, Esther
A1 Jiménez, Manuel
A2 Economía General
K1 Technological value
K1 Patent disclosure
K1 Spillovers
K1 Global duopoly
K1 Patent citations
K1 Patent family
AB This paper analyses the effects on patent quality of a type of spillovers arising from the disclosure of patent information by firms engaged in competition in a global duopoly. Both firms are involved in producing new technologies and they do not cooperate on joint patents. In this context, we explored whether the disclosure of crucial knowledge in the patents of one of the firms affects the patent quality of its respective competitor. The empirical methodology relies on forward citations as an indicator of quality, and backward citations to the competitor as a measure of spillovers. We estimated several count models with a sample of 7750 patent families (divided into subsamples) owned by two large companies, Airbus and Boeing. Our econometric findings show that, for technologies in which the two firms account for the majority of the global patents, neither of the firms in the duopoly was able to harness spillovers from the rival to improve the quality of its patents. However, knowledge from the competitor becomes relevant, at least for one of the focal firms, in explaining patent quality of other technologies in which the two firms do not exert a dominant position.
PB SPRINGER
SN 0892-9912
YR 2021
FD 2021-09
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10498/25552
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10498/25552
LA eng
NO This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness [Grant Number ECO2016-79436-R], [AEI/FEDER/UE]. Previous versions of the paper were presented at the 2018 Technology Transfer Society Annual Conference (Valencia), the 2019 International Open and User Innovation Conference (Utretcht), and the 2019 annual International Conference on Economics and Security (Madrid). The authors express their thanks to colleagues at these conferences for their helpful suggestions. The authors are also very grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and insightful comments.
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Cádiz
RD 07-nov-2026