Patent Races and Optimal Patent Breadth and Length

This paper reexamines the issue of optimal patent breadth in extending the earlier literature to the case where many firms race for a patent. It also discusses several examples that suggest the relevance of the nature of competition prevailing in the product market to explain the diverse results found in the literature. Loosely speaking, the less efficient is competition in the product market, the more likely it is that broad and short patents are socially optimal. Copyright 1996 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.