Measuring the performance of standard setting organizations

Timothy Simcoe, and Marc Rysman

12/08/2008
(Original Publish Date: 3/3/2006)

This paper proposes a new method for evaluating the performance of standard setting organizations (SSOs) using patent citations. A sample of patents obtained from the publicly available intellectual property disclosure records of fourteen SSOs is used to illustrate the proposed approach. The method has two major advantages. First, citations are easily measured and compared across different standards and SSOs. And second, it is possible to examine both average citation rates and changes in patent citation rates following disclosure. Average citation rates provide a measure of SSOs’ ability to identify important technologies, while changes provide a measure of their ability to influence a particular technology’s economic or technological significance. The results show that SSO patents are cited far more frequently than an average patent from the same vintage and technology class, and that disclosure is followed by a statistically significant increase in the citation rate. These findings suggest that SSOs not only identify and endorse important technologies, but also influence their future significance. The method is also used to compare the relative size of these “selection” and “endorsement” effects at formal Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs) versus less formal consortia. In the author’s sample, the selection effect is significantly larger for consortia, but the evidence of a disclosure effect is stronger for SDOs.