Benjamin Büttner

I’m a PhD candidate in economics at Eindhoven University of Technology. I study how barriers (like language, paywalls, or search costs) limit the diffusion and reuse of disclosed scientific and technical knowledge. I work with messy, large-scale data from patents, publications, and migration records, using econometrics, machine learning, and a fair amount of debugging.

I’ve always liked figuring out how systems work—where they break, what gets lost, and what’s hidden in plain sight. That same mindset runs through my research, whether it’s tracking how ideas move across borders or why some knowledge ends up invisible.

I’m also interested in how people and knowledge circulate between societies. Travel, tacit knowledge, and institutional quirks all shape how I think about diffusion and access.

selected publications

Patents and Knowledge Diffusion: The Impact of Machine Translation

Benjamin Büttner, Murat Firat, and Emilio Raiteri

Research Policy, Dec 2022

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One of the main rationales for the existence of the patent system is to encourage knowledge diffusion through the full disclosure of the technical knowledge embodied in a patented invention. Yet, economists and legal scholars cast doubts on the validity of the disclosure theory. The empirical evidence on the actual benefits of the disclosure function remains limited. The present paper aims to expand our understanding of how information spreads via patent disclosure and exploits recent improvements in machine translation (MT) to identify the effect of broader access to patented knowledge. More specifically, the paper uses a unique natural experiment. In September 2013, Google launched a major upgrade to its Google Patents service and added patent applications from the China National Intellectual Property Agency (CNIPA) to its searchable patent database. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we show that the translation of the Chinese patents into English resulted in an increase in citations received from patents filed by US inventors compared to a suitable control group comprising patents that Google translated only in 2016. Our results suggest that improved access to patented knowledge fosters knowledge diffusion.
@article{buttner2022, title = {Patents and Knowledge Diffusion: The Impact of Machine Translation}, shorttitle = {Patents and Knowledge Diffusion}, author = {Büttner, Benjamin and Firat, Murat and Raiteri, Emilio}, year = {2022}, month = dec, journal = {Research Policy}, volume = {51}, number = {10}, pages = {104584}, issn = {0048-7333}, doi = {10.1016/j.respol.2022.104584}, urldate = {2025-05-07}, langid = {english}, dimensions = {false}, }
Breaking the Paywall: Patents as Channels for Scientific Disclosure

Benjamin Büttner and Emilio Raiteri

Presented at 20th Annual Conference of European Policy for Intellectual Property Association, EPIP 2025, Dec 2025

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This paper examines whether patents can substitute for restricted-access scientific publications as a source of knowledge. We focus on cases where scientific content is replicated or disclosed in patent documents, enabling downstream users to access findings without paywall barriers. Using matched patent–paper data and citation outcomes, we show that such disclosure through patents disproportionately benefits resource-constrained actors, suggesting that patents may partially mitigate access inequalities in science.