A 27 percent valuation error plagues most corporate balance sheets because accountants wrongly assume that brands live forever.
April 29, 2026
Original Paper
Breaking the Perpetuity Myth: A Weibull Calibration of Trademark Survival Risk for Accurate Intangible Valuation
SSRN · 6657899
The Takeaway
Trademarks face a growing risk of dying out as they get older. Standard financial models treat a brand name as a permanent asset that will produce value into infinity. Weibull calibration data shows that brand mortality is a real and measurable force that increases over time. Accounting for this risk reveals that businesses are systematically overvaluing their intellectual property. Investors are paying a massive premium for brand names that are much closer to extinction than the spreadsheets suggest.
From the abstract
This paper presents the first empirical survival analysis of United States registered trademarks disaggregated by all 45 Nice International Classification classes. Using rightcensored survival data drawn from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Trademark Case Files Dataset-covering 6,557,127 unique trademark processes with registration dates spanning 1870 to 2024-we calibrate Weibull proportional hazard parameters (k and λ) for each Nice class via Maximum Likelihood Estimation