This paper considers a dynamic model of the evolution of open source software projects, focusing on the evolution of quality, contributing programmers, and users who contribute customer support to other users. Programmers who have used open source software are motivated by reciprocal altruism to...

Copyright affects the distribution of creative content. Taking works off copyright promotes their availability, which benefits consumers. But it also allows generic entry to dissipate producer surplus. This paper examines the effect of a copyright on the availability and price of books when...

Family businesses make up forty percent of the Fortune 500 companies in the US, generate about two-thirds of the German GDP, employ about one-half of the labor force in Britain, and account for the majority of the private economies in developing countries. This paper develops a theory of family...

Previous work on the effects of private income transfers has been confined to intra-family interactions. One implication of this work is that such transfers benefit recipients by insuring against labor market risks. Allowing for equilibrium labor market responses, however, one would expect the...

Previous work on the effects of private income transfers has been confined to intra-family interactions. One implication of this work is that such transfers benefit recipients by insuring against labor market risks. Allowing for equilibrium labor market responses, however, one would expect the...

We study a credence goods problem - that is, a moral hazard problem with non-contractible outcome - where altruistic experts (the agents) care both about their income and the utility of consumers (the principals). Experts' preferences over income and their consumers' utility are convex, such...

We analyze the offering, asking, and granting of help or other benefits as a three-stage game with bilateral private information between a person in need of help and a potential help-giver. Asking entails the risk of rejection, which can be painful: since unawareness of the need can no longer be...

We analyze the offering, asking, and granting of help or other benefits as a three-stage game with bilateral private information between a person in need of help and a potential help-giver. Asking entails the risk of rejection, which can be painful: since unawareness of the need can no longer be...

We consider a model where agents differ in their ‘types' which determines their voluntary contribution towards a public good. We analyze what the equilibrium composition of groups are under centralized and centralized choice. We show that there exists a top-down sorting equilibrium i.e. an...

Pay-what-you-want schemes can be a useful tool to finance high quality and independent news media without restricting readership, therefore guaranteeing maximum diffusion. We conduct a field experiment with the Italian information site lavoce.info to explore how to structure a campaign in a way...