An Applicant’s Guide To USPTO’s Examiner Incentive System

Incentives are powerful tools for driving behavior. On this topic, billionaire businessman Charlie Munger famously advised to “[n]ever, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.” Because the pathway from patent application to granted patent depends heavily on the actions and judgments of the examiner assigned to the application, a patent applicant is well advised to consider the examiner’s perspective and the incentives imposed by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office through the examiner production system, also referred to as the count system.

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