Changes

Patents might act to certify their patent-holders in the face of information asymmetries (see, for example, Hsu and Ziedonis, 2007). Thus firms with acquirers of targets with patents might value the certification of a venture capitalist less than when they consider targets without patents. Likewise, on average about 2/3rds of all patent citations are added by examiners (Alc�acer Alcacer and Gittelman, 2006 and Cotropia et al., 2010). Thus citation counts might represent the search costs associated with finding information about patents. That is, patents with more citations are the ones that are easiest to find, and so mitigate information asymmetries the most successfully.