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This paper investigates how increased examination workloads at patent office affect the patent examination process and tests whether workloads have any external effect on examiners' decisions. Using novel micro-level data, we provide the first empirical evidence that examiner decisions are systematically biased as workload increases, with examiners being more likely to grant a patent than to reject it. The regression results also indicate that the quality of examinations decreases as workload increases. In appeal trials, the likelihood of grant decision reversal significantly increases as workload increases, while the likelihood of the revocation of a refusal decision exhibits statistically significant negative relationship with increased workloads. These results imply that an examiner who lacks sufficient time for a prior art search tends to grant a patent and, consequently, a large workload decreases the quality of examinations by resulting in unqualified patents.

The current paper attempts to explore the employees’ inventor compensation plan in Korea using a comprehensive data set of Korean inventor survey in 2009. It aims to empirically examine the effect of the compensation plan on the innovations of Korean inventors. This paper finds that the compensation plan has a positive link with inventors’ performance; in particular, the high rate of compensation increases the quality of innovation. Furthermore, this paper extends its discussion to nonmonetary compensation types as well as monetary compensation. By examining the inventors’ various preferences for invention compensation, we find that the inventors of the private firms with greater preference for monetary compensation produce more patents, whereas those with greater preference for advantages in career produce more valuable patents. Second, inventors employed in public organizations with preferences for selfsatisfaction by technical proof are more likely to conduct research on more advanced and challenging te chnologies. This implies that employees’ invention compensation plan has room for further discussion on the types of non-monetary as well as monetary compensation.