Online Appendix to Irrational Ignorance at the Patent Office

In this Section of the Appendix, we discuss a bounded analysis of the personnel costs to the Patent Office (“the Agency”) that result from doubling patent examiner time allocations. In particular, we adopt different multipliers to account for the full cost of a patent examiner to the Patent Office in excess of their base salary. As discussed in Section II.A, we assume a 2.04 factor of an employee’s base salary to account for fringe benefits, employer taxes and insurance, and allotments for office space, rent, equipment, replacement/turnover cost, managerial support, etc. Below, we repeat the calculation in Table 2 of the Article but utilize a multiplier factor of 2.5 (Table A1) to provide a high estimate and a multiplier factor of 1.5 (Table A2) to provide a low estimate of the increase in payroll expenses associated with doubling