Drawing on the reputation literature and signaling theory, this article builds on work that looks at patents as reputation signals. We build a multi-industry database of patents that expire due to lack of maintenance fee payments and test for a relationship between these patents and the firm’s...

The question of how prices on patents rights should be determined in impersonal exchanges is examined in a laboratory environment. Dynamic gains from such organized trade with public prices are recorded. The experiment introduces a competitive market with impersonal exchange mechanisms and...