A completely different approach to this question is taken by Hoenig and Henkel (2015), who survey a large number of venture capitalists to elicit their choices among projects with varying degrees of uncertainty, patenting, team experience, and alliances. They use conjoint analysis to determine that possession of a patent application or grant makes the project more likely to be chosen for funding, but that this likelihood is not higher when the technology quality is unknown. They interpret this result to mean that the signaling aspect of patents is unimportant compared to their role as property rights to the technology.