Patent examiners, who are often accused of granting questionable patents, might lack proper incentives to carefully scrutinize applications. Furthermore, they have outside options and leave the patent office. It is thus interesting to investigate whether their granting behavior is affected by career concerns. In a simple setting, we analyze different incentive schemes that reward examiners on the basis of rejected and/or accepted patents. We then study the effect of career concerns on the granting behavior of examiners. We find that a reward based on rejection gives more incentives to search for relevant information, and career concerns increase these incentives. Besides, the information provided by the applicant has an impact on the examiners incentive to search for information.

中文翻译：

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专利审查员的货币和内隐激励

经常被指控授予可疑专利的专利审查员可能缺乏适当的动机来仔细审查申请。此外，他们还有其他选择，可以离开专利局。因此，有趣的是调查他们的授予行为是否受到职业关注的影响。在简单的情况下，我们分析了基于被拒绝和/或被接受的专利来奖励审查员的不同激励方案。然后，我们研究职业问题对考官授予行为的影响。我们发现，基于拒绝的奖励会提供更多的动机去搜索相关信息，而对职业的关注会增加这些动机。此外，申请人提供的信息还会影响审查员搜索信息的动机。