4 ms·
Bonuses to deny claims? Doesn't that swing the incentives the opposite way? I bet there are plenty of reasons somebody could come up with to deny any given pate
by lincolnq 16y ago
Bonuses to deny claims? Doesn't that swing the incentives the opposite way? I bet there are plenty of reasons somebody could come up with to deny any given patent. But some of them are genuinely valuable inventions and deserve protection. So I'm not sure this is the right path.
- russell 16y agoYou are right of course. The trick is to move the incentives to get the desired result. If the system is fundamentally chaotic, a simple tweak would result in all claims being denied. Or 90% of all patents being denied would probably not be a bad thing. If OTOH, the system is quasi-stable, correcting the incentives would remove the aberrations. Incentives tend to push the results to conform to incentives. But I also believe that it a fallacy to expect predictable results from a social system, thereby contradicting my above assertion.