Practitioners generally assert that collaboration with the Open Source software (OSS) community enables young software firms to achieve superior innovation performance. Nonetheless, to the best of our knowledge, scholars have never extensively speculated about this assertion or rigorously tested...

Dual licensing has proved to be a sustainable business model for various commercial software vendors employing open source strategies. In this paper we study the main characteristics of dual licensing and under which conditions it represents a profitable commercial strategy. We show that dual...

Although open source software has recently attracted a relevant body of economic literature, a formal treatment of the process of com- petition with its proprietary counterpart is still missing. Starting from an epidemic model of innovation di?usion, we try to ?ll this gap. We propose a model...

Recent experimental evidence suggests that some people dislike telling lies, and tell the truth even at a cost. We use experiments as well to study the socio-demographic covariates of such lie aversion, and find gender and religiosity to be without predictive value. However, subjects’ major is...

We show that a combination of temporariness and spending pressure is intrinsic to the aid relationship. In our analysis, recipients rationally discount the pronouncements of donors about the duration of their commitments because in equilibrium they know that some donors will honor those...

This paper tests the external validity of a simple Dictator Game as a laboratory analogue for a naturally occurring policy-relevant decision-making context. In Uganda, where teacher absenteeism is a problem, primary school teachers’ allocations to parents in a Dictator Game are positively but...

Using a South African data set, the paper poses six questions about the determinants of subjective well-being. Much of the paper is concerned with the role of relative concepts. We find that comparator income - measured as average income of others in the local residential cluster - enters the...

The literature on social norms stresses that compliance with norms is approved while deviance is disapproved. Based on this, we explore the content of social norms using experimental data from five dictator games with a feedback stage. Our data suggests that subjects either care about a...

Prior studies have shown that selfish behavior is reduced when co–players have the opportunity to approve/disapprove a player’s choice, even if that has no consequences on the player’s material payoff. Using a prisoner’s dilemma, we experimentally study the causes of this phenomenon,...

We present a game-theoretical model that accounts for abundant experimental evidence from games with non-binding communication (‘cheap talk’). It is based on two key ideas: People are conditionally averse to break norms of honesty and fairness (i.e., the emotional cost of breaking a norm is...