ABSTRACT
As Chapter 4 has shown, discussions on whether patent systems are indeed beneficial to society or how to design a patent system are as old as patent systems themselves. The first formal-mathematical formulation of a patent policy instrument – the patent length – was developed in the mid-1960s. Since then, the effects of many other patent policy instruments have been studied. Naturally, the first models relied on a purely national framework. The second part of this book introduces the most influential approaches for a closed economy.
