Yun Hou, Ivan P.L. Png, Xi Xiong, When stronger patent law reduces patenting: Empirical evidence, Strategic Management Journal, 44.4 (2023): 977-1012.
Exploiting variation in the shift in patent law due to the Federal Circuit Appeals Court (CAFC), we find that the average increase in patent protection due to the CAFC led businesses in the complex industry to reduce strategic patenting by 23.3%. Theoretically, stronger legal protection affects strategic portfolios in two ways. As each patent becomes more effective, the gain from multiple patents would be less, reducing the demand for patents (negative inframarginal effect). With the effective price of patent protection being lower, the demand for protection and patents would increase (positive marginal effect). The net effect is especially negative for complex industries, where products are protected by multiple patents.
Yun Hou, Ivan P.L. Png, Xi Xiong, The Federal Circuit enriched patent owners without eliciting better inventions, Texas Intellectual Property Law Journal, 31(2023): 295-326
How do changes in patent law affect the exchange by which society awards an exclusive right of limited duration and the inventor discloses technology that others may freely use after the period of exclusivity? Between 1983-85, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) shifted the law in favor of patent owners, to degrees varying geographically by judicial circuit. We find that the CAFC was associated with an increase in the commercial value of patents by 11.7 percent but no significant increase in the technological quality of the patented inventions. Apparently, the value of the patent monopoly increased substantially without a commensurate increase in inventors’ contribution of knowledge to society.
Gebhardt, S., Hou, Y., and Yarime, M. (2026), Directing environmental innovation toward radical clean technologies for sustainable transitions: Market-based vs. command-and-control policies, Research Policy, 55(4), 105446.
We argue that market-based instruments provide long-term incentives and technological flexibility that enable transformative innovation, while generating market-size effects that shrink demand for polluting technologies and expand markets for clean alternatives. This creates strategic incentives for radical innovation. In contrast, command-and-control policies impose fixed compliance thresholds without altering market structures or generating continuous pressure for innovation. We test these hypotheses using environmental patenting data from manufacturing firms across 17 EU countries from 1991 to 2020. Results demonstrate that market-based policies significantly enhance clean technology innovation and increase technological radicalness, while command-and-control policies show no significant effect on environmental innovation. These findings contribute to research on disruptive sustainability and policy-induced innovation by demonstrating how market-based instruments catalyze radical clean technologies and support sustainability transitions.
Yuru Huang, Chao Liu, Yunna Cai, Lina Xu, Yun Hou, Mingming Fan (2026), "I Wouldn't Really Use It as a Practice Tool": Understanding Medical Students' Perspectives and Needs on LLM-Enhanced Clinical Skills Training, Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26), April 13-17, 2026, Barcelona, Spain.
This study explores medical students’ challenges and expectations when using LLM-based clinical skills training through a two-phase investigation involving 14 medical students. We integrated five Type 2 Diabetes cases into a probe platform and conducted probe-based studies followed by co-design workshops. We identified challenges across three categories: dialogue content (lack of realism, insufficient knowledge depth differentiation); dialogue presentation (information overload, single modality limitations); and dialogue interaction (inadequate guidance and feedback). Co-design workshops revealed expectations for enhanced patient modeling, personalized content delivery, structured presentation frameworks, and collaborative features. These findings provide design considerations for developing more effective, user-centered LLM-based medical education systems.