Publications

Article

The Growing Problem of Patent Trolling

By: Lauren Cohen, Umit Gurun and Scott Duke Kominers

The last decade has seen a sharp rise in patent litigation in the U.S., with 2015 having one of the highest patent lawsuit counts on record. In theory, this could be a consequence of growth in the commercialization of technology and innovation—patent lawsuits increase... View Details

Keywords: Patent Aggregators; Patent Litigation; Patent Pools; Patent Trolls; Patents; Lawsuits and Litigation; United States

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2017
Chapter

Empirical Evidence on the Behavior and Impact of Patent Trolls: A Survey

By: Lauren Cohen, Umit Gurun and Scott Duke Kominers

We survey the empirical literature on non-practicing entity (NPE) litigation behavior and its consequences. We document both aggregate trends and cross-sectional differences amongst various types of NPEs. Survey evidence illustrates a number of ways in which NPEs can... View Details

Keywords: Patent Trolls; NPEs; PAEs; Innovation; Patents; Lawsuits and Litigation; Innovation and Invention

05 Jul 2011
News

The Business of Champions

more visible — lessons than do other endeavors is subject to debate. (Popular HBS cases include ones about Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, the West Point crew team, and the NFL’s New England Patriots.) Still, Bruins fans can be... View Details

Keywords: Garry Emmons; Performing Arts, Spectator Sports, and Related Industries; Arts, Entertainment

22 Jul 2014
First Look

First Look: July 22

most effectively stabilizes fluctuations under real external shocks. Download working paper: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/download.aspx?name=13-074.pdf Patent Trolls By: Cohen, Lauren, Umit G. Gurun, and Scott Duke Kominers... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

05 Apr 2018
News

A Philanthropic Eye Reframes African American Abstract Art

Solitary,” a traveling exhibition of African-American abstract art that opened at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans in fall 2017. Now on view at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the exhibit has expanded to more... View Details

Keywords: Jill Radsken

10 Aug 2016
Research & Ideas

Prospective Students Steer Clear of Schools Rocked by Scandal

think about which college to attend,” Luca says. Rolling Stone has been responsible for three long-form articles about campus scandals in the past decade, including the Dartmouth incident; a 2006 case at Duke University in which three... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Education

08 Feb 2016
Research & Ideas

The Civic Benefits of Google Street View and Yelp

use it. In the paper, Luca, Edward L. Glaeser and Scott Duke Kominers (PhDBE 2011) of Harvard University, and PhD student Nikhil Naik of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, cite three trends that make cities particularly... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Consumer Products

07 Dec 2011
Research & Ideas

Are Creative People More Dishonest?

at Harvard Business School, who wrote the article with Dan Ariely of Duke University. "But is creativity always good? We often hear of cases in which people use innovative behavior to create a sense that what they're doing is not... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Advertising

2023
Other Article

The Harvard USPTO Patent Dataset: A Large-Scale, Well-Structured, and Multi-Purpose Corpus of Patent Applications

By: Mirac Suzgun, Luke Melas-Kyriazi, Suproteem K. Sarkar, Scott Duke Kominers and Stuart Shieber

Innovation is a major driver of economic and social development, and information about many kinds of innovation is embedded in semi-structured data from patents and patent applications. Though the impact and novelty of innovations expressed in patent data are difficult... View Details

Keywords: USPTO; Natural Language Processing; Classification; Summarization; Patent Novelty; Patent Trolls; Patent Enforceability; Patents; Innovation and Invention; Intellectual Property; AI and Machine Learning; Analytics and Data Science

November 2019
Article

Full Substitutability

By: John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers, Alexandru Nichifor, Michael Ostrovsky and Alexander Westkamp

Various forms of substitutability are essential for establishing the existence of equilibria and other useful properties in diverse settings such as matching, auctions, and exchange economies with indivisible goods. We extend earlier models’ definitions of... View Details

Keywords: Substitutability; Mathematical Methods; Auctions; Market Design

2015
Working Paper

Full Substitutability

By: John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers, Alexandru Nichifor, Michael Ostrovsky and Alexander Westkamp

Various forms of substitutability are essential for establishing the existence of equilibria and other useful properties in diverse settings such as matching, auctions, and exchange economies with indivisible goods. We extend earlier models' canonical definitions of... View Details

Keywords: Market Design; Balance and Stability

02 Jan 2012
Research & Ideas

Most Popular Articles of 2011

publicity compensate for the deep hit to profit margins? This paper sets out to help small businesses decide whether it makes sense to offer discount vouchers. Research was conducted by Harvard Business School professor Ben Edelman, Business Economics PhD candidate... View Details

Keywords: by Staff

April 2024
Case

Farcaster

By: Scott Duke Kominers, Shai Bernstein and Liang Wu

Educators

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July 28, 2022
Article

DAO Governance Attacks, and How to Avoid Them

By: Pranav Garimidi, Scott Duke Kominers and Tim Roughgarden

Many web3 projects embrace permissionless voting using a fungible and tradable native token. Permissionless voting can offer many benefits, from lowering barriers to entry to increasing competition. Token holders can use their tokens to vote on a range of issues—from... View Details

Keywords: Crypto Economy; Cryptocurrency; Governance; Voting; Decentralized Autonomous Organizations; Organizational Structure; Digital Platforms

September 24, 2021
Article

A Labor Movement for the Platform Economy

By: Li Jin, Scott Duke Kominers and Lila Shroff

Platforms are fundamentally changing the contract between workers and companies—and the workers and creatives that create value for platform companies, and rely on platforms for their livelihoods, often have little power when it comes to getting their concerns... View Details

Keywords: Gig Workers; Decentralized Collective Action; Internet and the Web; Labor; Labor and Management Relations; Digital Platforms

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August 2020
Article

Lone Wolves in Competitive Equilibria

By: Ravi Jagadeesan, Scott Duke Kominers and Ross Rheingans-Yoo

This paper develops a class of equilibrium-independent predictions of competitive equilibrium with indivisibilities. Specifically, we prove an analogue of the “Lone Wolf Theorem” of classical matching theory, showing that when utility is perfectly transferable, any... View Details

Keywords: Indivisibilities; Matching; Lone Wolf Theorem; Marketplace Matching; Theory

Article

Course Allocation by Proxy Auction

By: Scott Duke Kominers, Mike Ruberry and Jonathan Ullman

2016
Working Paper

Paying (for) Attention: The Impact of Information Processing Costs on Bayesian Inference

By: Scott Duke Kominers, Xiaosheng Mu and Alexander Peysakhovich

Human information processing is often modeled as costless Bayesian inference. However, research in psychology shows that attention is a computationally costly and potentially limited resource. We study a Bayesian individual for whom computing posterior beliefs is... View Details

Keywords: Behavior; Cognition and Thinking; Economics

March 2016
Article

To Groupon or Not to Groupon: The Profitability of Deep Discounts

By: Benjamin Edelman, Sonia Jaffe and Scott Duke Kominers

We examine the profitability and implications of online discount vouchers, a relatively new marketing tool that offers consumers large discounts when they prepay for participating firms' goods and services. Within a model of repeat experience good purchase, we examine... View Details

Keywords: Voucher Discounts; Groupon; Experience Goods; Repeat Purchase; Internet and the Web; Marketing Strategy; Marketing Communications