Drawing on the reputation literature and signaling theory, this article builds on work that looks at
patents as reputation signals. We build a multi-industry database of patents that expire due to lack
of maintenance fee payments and test for a relationship between these patents and the firm’s IPO
date. We find a significant and positive relationship between the likelihood of patents expiring due
to lack of maintenance fee payments and the time to IPO. We also find that patents associated with
firms which are not venture capital backed, are more likely to expire. Our findings suggest that
patents that are used for signaling intentions are more likely to be underutilized. Implications for
research and policy are discussed
