Firms producing differentiated products have high margins and therefore low risk. As a result firms invest more into developing differentiated products when they perceive risk is high. Higher risk also implies higher product skewness towards more differentiated products and therefore higher...

In recent years there has been an increasing diffusion of open source projects, as well as an increasing interest among scholars on the topic. Open source software (OSS) is developed by communities of programmers and users, usually sponsored by private firms; OSS is available in the public...

Because open source assets are developed collectively, there is no single source for cost estimates of how much it has taken to develop the technology. There is a great value on open source delopments (OSD), but current legal framework for financial reporting doesn’t allow to report on them...

The aim of this brief paper is to interpret al Qaeda’s modus operandi in the light of the economic theory of contests. The main idea expressed here is that al Qaeda can be considered as a contest-designer rewarding an indivisible prize. Affiliated groups compete with each other to win the...

This paper explores empirically what factors influence a firm’s decision to contribute and to take leadership in open source projects. Increasing firms’ participation in the development of open source software (OSS) is generally perceived as a puzzle. Assuming that firms face a...

I consider a Vickrey-Salop model of spatial product differentiation with quasi-linear utility functions and contrast two modes of production, the proprietary model where entrepreneurs sell software to the users, and the open source model where users participate in software development. I show...

The rivalry between developers of open source and proprietary software encourages open source developers to court users and respond to their needs. If the open source developer wants to promote her own open source standard and solutions, she may choose liberal license terms such as those of the...

This paper considers the intersection of academic spatial analysis with the open source revolution. Its basic premise is that the potential for cross-fertilization between the two is rich, yet some misperceptions about these two communities pose challenges to realizing these opportunities. The...

This paper adds to the growing literature on the formation of online communities from an historical perspective by telling of the emergence and development of a service for speedy, online distribution of recent additions to the broad literatures on economics and related areas called NEP: New...