Patent examiners are rated on office ACTIONS. Grants and denies both count as actions, although denials often take more effort (and complaints from the potential patentee).
I mean they're not rated on ACTIONS. They're rated on their PRODUCTION UNITS; of which an ALLOWANCE yields twice as many PRODUCTION UNITS than a REJECTION yields.
So; clerk are incentivized to grant a patent as it takes less effort and yields more production units. If a patent is of poor quality and later is invalidated in a lawsuit; the clerk will not lose production units. Therefore; the clerk is incentivized to grant patents as they count as more production units and not penalized for granting a patent they shouldn't've.
This is a misunderstanding of the slideshow. As can be seen on slide 10, productivity is "Number of office actions / period of time" and slide 12 shows the breakdown of how production units are calculated from office actions. A final disposition (allowance, appeal, or abandonment) is worth twice as much as a final rejection; however, that does not mean an examiner is incentivized to allow patents. Rather, they are incentivized to get to the end of the process by either allowing the patent, having the patentee appeal the examiner's final rejection, or by the patentee abandoning their application. Which of these three occurs is irrelevant to the examiner, although as I said before: an allowance take the least amount of effort.
In fact, the most production units that can be obtained by a patent examiner for any particular patent is to issue a final rejection, get the patentee to ask for re-examination, reject again, and then have the patentee abandon the patent.
