Procrastination at the Patent Office?

Pointing to a limited set of statistics suggesting that examiners turn in much of their work product at the end of quota periods, the Commerce Department has recently raised concerns over examiner procrastination and its consequences for examination quality. End-loading of review completions alone, however, is not dispositive evidence of procrastination. In this paper, we confirm that examiners complete a substantial percentage of reviews at the end of both bi-weekly and quarterly quotas and then proceed to test for additional markers that may separate a procrastination explanation for these findings from a range of alternative theories. Among other tests explored in this regard, we predict and find evidence of an immediate spike in end-loading upon the onset of examiner telecommuting, a change in work environments that likely exacerbates self-control problems. Our findings support a procrastination interpretation for at least some portion of the observed end-loading of reviews, with our outcomes analysis suggesting that the predominant consequence of this behavior for examination quality is an increase in examination durations.