We argue that the intrinsic inefficiency of proprietary software has historically created a space for alternative institutions that provide software as a public good. We discuss several sources of such inefficiency, focusing on one that has not been described in the literature: the...

Drawing insights from the field of innovation economics, we discuss the likely competitive environment shaping generative AI advances. Central to our analysis are the concepts of appropriability--whether firms in the industry are able to control the knowledge generated by their innovations--and...

We present a model of industry equilibrium to study the coexistence of open-source and proprietary firms. Two novel aspects of the model are (i) participation in open source arises as the optimal decision of profit-maximizing firms, and (ii) open-source and proprietary firms may (or may not)...

The open source model is a form of software development with source code that is typically made available to all interested parties. At the core of this process is a decentralized production process: open source software development is done by a network of unpaid software developers. Using data...

We investigate the recent fee mechanism EIP1559 of the Ethereum network. Whereas previous studies have focused on myopic miners, we here focus on rational miners in the sense of having level-k foresight. We derive expressions for optimal miner behavior (in terms of setting block sizes) in the...

This paper examines the motivation for intergenerational transfers between adult children and their parents, and the nature of preferences for such giving behaviour, in an experimental setting. Participants in our experiment play a series of dictator games with parents and strangers, in which we...

Economists believe that a problem of team production results from the desirability of production in (sometimes large) groups, the difficulty of rewarding individual group members based on their (difficult or impossible to measure) individual contributions, and the presumed interest of each...

In the U.S. and Europe, a ban on a market in human organs has been in place since 1984. The system of organ procurement, therefore, relies on altruistic donation from stranger to stranger. The principle intellectual and policy issues surrounding organ procurement concern the question of whether,...