Abstract:    Based on the "non-equilibrium" situation of patent thicket affecting the market value of enterprises and the situational factors of the inhibitory effect of patent assets, this study took 419 computer, communication, and other electronic equipment manufacturing enterprises in China as samples, and used quantile regression estimation to obtain the following conclusions: The number of patent applications of Chinese enterprises has shown a "blowout" growth, which highlights the importance of patents in promoting the market value of enterprises. However, enterprises have ignored the "devil" side of patents - the negative effect of "patent thicket". The "patent thicket" refers to the existence of a large number of patents in the industry, and the patents of a single patentee form a complementary relationship with the cited patents, but different patentees hold these cited patents. If companies want to obtain these complementary patents, they must pay a large number of patent license fees. The original intention of intellectual property protection is to provide "external incentives" for corporate innovation and to make patents a "booster" for corporate competition and profit. However, suppose the patents required by an enterprise are scattered among different patent holders. In that case, the enterprise will instead face increased innovation costs, reduced technology spillover effects, and increased external resource constraints. It can be seen that the "patent thicket" will affect the market value of enterprises.The existing literature on the relationship between patent thicket and enterprise market value mainly focuses on the following aspects: (1) "Fragmented" patent rights are easy to derive patent ripping off, which will reduce the market value of enterprises; and (2) Different mechanisms of patent thickets on the market value of enterprises. They also have the following deficiencies: (1) There is a lack of research on the relationship between the patent thicket and the market value of enterprises in the context of China; (2) The moderating effect of patent assets is ignored in the patent thicket study on enterprises′ market value; and (3) There is a lack of discussion on the differences in the moderating effects of different types of patent assets. Based on the shortcomings of the previous literature, this study firstly followed the theoretical logic of "resource structure-heterogeneous resources-performance", and took 419 listed companies in China′s computer, communication, and other electronic equipment manufacturing industries as research samples to analyze the effect of the patent thicket on the enterprise market and the influence mechanism of value; secondly, it analyzed the adjustment mechanism of enterprise patent assets in different market value quantiles of enterprises, and the adjustment difference of different types of patent assets.Through expansion of the existing research, this paper drew the following conclusions and theoretical contributions: firstly, as the quantile of the firm′s market value increases, the negative effect of the patent thicket on the firm′s market value increases. This study verified that in the context of China, there is a "non-equilibrium" state in which patent thicket restricts the promotion of enterprise market value, and extends the research on the relationship between patent thicket and enterprise market value.Secondly, patent assets can positively adjust the negative impact of patent thickets and help companies increase market value. The research enriches and expands the research of resource-based theory through the differences in the moderating effect of patent assets on the impact of patent thickets on different companies′ market value quantiles under the constraints of patent thickets. At the same time, the moderating effect of patent assets is examined from a more comprehensive perspective. Although previous literature has studied the moderating effect of patent assets, it has not broken down the types of patent assets. China′s patent system is different from that of the United States. Utility model patents account for a large proportion, while invention patents are more valuable and innovative than utility model patents. One of the contributions of the research is that combined with the characteristics of China′s patent system, patent assets are divided into invention patents and utility models, and integrated into the research framework of the relationship between patent thicket and enterprise market value, through the interaction effect test of these two patent assets and patent dispersion index. This paper analyzes the adjustment differences of different types of patent assets on the impact of patent thickets on the market value of enterprises. Finally, this study started from the three aspects of the "non-equilibrium" situation of the influence effect of the patent thicket, the market value of enterprises, and the maintenance time of patents, examined the situational factors of patent assets regulating the effect of the patent thicket on the market value of enterprises, and expanded the research on patent thicket. An important research conclusion is that in the dense environment of patent thickets, companies with high market value quantiles need to maintain the effectiveness of their patent assets more than companies with low market value quantiles to ensure that companies can obtain profits.

Key words: patent thicket, corporate market value, patent asset, non-equilibrium effect