Yevgeny Tsodikovich

If you are outside academic econ circles and you want to get into a PhD program, the path is straightforward: just write and publish a theory paper somewhere like Games and Economic Behavior. With reasonable probability, if you have a GEB or comparable R&R, someone will take you

Patents, like peer reviewed publications, look impressive in CVs, and many institutions reward them. I have seen this with my own eyes, after my host institution offered a bonus for patent applications (not registrations!) my PhD-advisor promptly applied for a patent to convert garbage into energy with higher dimensional black hole relics (which, for all we know, don’t exist). A research team with lead at Northwestern University in the United States reports a new type of academic fraud: fake patents. They have found multiple companies which sell credits on UK registered designs to academics, mostly in India, who can use them to boost promotion scores and institutional rankings. UK registered designs are not technically patents. They protect appearance, not function, and are not checked for novelty before registration, which makes them fast and cheap to obtain. The companies sold these off for prices corresponding to roughly $20 to $400 per authorship. Many of the fake patents had long technical-sounding titles, multiple academic applicants, recycled images, and implausible products, including an alleged artificial intelligence skin-cancer device that appears to be a modified Glock pistol model (see image).