The role of research and ownership collaboration in generating patent quality: China-U.S comparisons

This paper uses patent data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to investigate the association between inventor collaboration and joint assignee ownership, both domestic and international, and patent quality as measured by the number of claims and citations associated with a patent. Specifically, we compare the quality implications of research collaboration and joint patent ownership for the quality of U.S. and Chinese patents. Overall, we find that domestic inventor collaboration is associated with higher quality results for U.S. patents than Chinese patents. However, for China, international collaboration is associated with more positive quality outcomes; for U.S. patents, international collaboration implies lower quality than that associated with domestic U.S. collaboration. Part of this disparity is due to substantially different quality outcomes associated with joint U.S.-Chinese patents – quality gains for China and quality reductions for the U.S. We also investigate the quality implications of different organization-centered research, including dyadic and triadic collaborations, for patent quality as well as the quality implications of various assignee-inventor relationships, operating through incentive and scale effects. While most firms, particularly those in the U.S., appear to exploit advantages of fewer owner-assignees coordinating the scale benefits of more inventors, universities and research institutes in China appear to rely less on coordination-scale effects and more on the incentive effects associated with assigning patent ownership to inventors.