Crowdsourcing in patent examination: overcoming patent examiners' local search bias

This article investigates how crowdsourcing for knowledge creation in a crucial knowledge-intense task - patent application examination - informs decision-making. It is hypothesized that patent examiners' views underly a local search bias (i.e., they rely on locally preferred and conveniently available local information), which may be overcome through crowdsourcing. To analyze this potential effect of crowdsourcing, this study analyzes USPTO's Peer To Patent initiative, opening the patent examination process to public participation for the first time. The data from this initiative is further enhanced with data from the PatentsView database and the Patent Examination Research Database. The study results provide the first empirical evidence that crowdsourcing aids a patent examination process in overcoming the examiner's local search bias - their over-reliance on internal knowledge. In particular, it is found that crowdsourcing in patent examination increases examiners' reliance on atypical and less formalized knowledge. Overall, these findings enable several theoretical and practical recommendations.