Ling Zhou Awarded 1st Prize in the 4iP Council Research Competition
© 2021 EPFL
Ling Zhou, a PhD student at the Chair of Innovation and IP Policy (IIPP), has been awarded 1st Prize by the 2020 4iP Council for the paper “Patents and Supra-Competitive Prices: Evidence from Consumer Products”, which she coauthored with Prof. de Rassenfosse
The paper examines the longstanding debate in the innovation literature, namely whether patent protection provides sufficient incentives to encourage innovation by allowing firms to charge supra-competitive prices. In their research, Ling Zhou and Prof. de Rassenfosse were able to test the presence of "price premium" conferred on a broad category of patented products with a linked database of patents to products as well as the Amazon prices of these products. They found that a loss in patent protection due to expiry decreases the prices for consumer products by 7- 8%.
This paper is part of the IPRoduct project chaired by Prof. de Rassenfosse. More information about IPRoduct
About the 4iP: Based in Brussels, 4iP Council is a European research council dedicated to developing high quality academic insight and empirical evidence on topics related to intellectual property and innovation.