Much of today’s software relies on programming code shared openly online. Yet, it is unclear why volunteer developers contribute to open-source software (OSS), a public good. We study OSS contributions of some 22,900 developers worldwide on the largest online code repository platform, GitHub,...

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...

Despite a widespread interest in the warm glow model [Andreoni (1989,1990)], surprisingly most attention focused on the voluntary contribution equilibrium of the model, and only very little attention has been devoted to the competitive equilibrium. In this paper, we introduce the notion of...

This paper deals with a core-equilibrium equivalence in an economy with public goods where preferences of consumers display warm glow effects. We demonstrate that provided that each consumer becomes satiated to other consumers provision, it holds that, for a sufficiently large economy, the set...

The literature suggests that the household invests in the human capital of a child member not only for altruistic reasons but also as insurance against future income shocks. Hence, the allocation of the child's time between school and work is a function of the risk preference of the household...

Why do people give when asked, but prefer not to be asked, and even take when possible? We show that standard behavioral axioms including separability, narrow bracketing, and scaling invariance predict these seemingly inconsistent observations. Specifically, these axioms imply that...

This study investigates the prevalence and extent of altruism by examining the relationship between parents' and their adult children's subjective well-being in a data set extracted from the German Socio-Economic Panel. In order to segregate the share of parents with altruistic preferences from...

Society’s demands for individual and corporate social responsibility as an alternative response to market and distributive failures are becoming increasingly prominent. We first draw on recent developments in the “psychology and economics” of prosocial behavior to shed light on this trend,...

Much progress has been made in recent years on developing and applying a direct measure of utility using survey questions on subjective well-being. In this paper we explore whether this new type of measurement can be fruitfully applied to the study of interdependent utility in general, and...

We study a form of threshold matching in fundraising where donations above a certain threshold are topped up with a fixed amount. We show theoretically that threshold matching can induce crowding in if appropriately personalized. In a field experiment, we explore how thresholds should be chosen...