Concern about potential free riding in the provision of public goods has a long history. More recently, experimental economists have turned their attention to the conditions under which free riding would be expected to occur. A model of free riding is provided here which demonstrates that...

The open-source software operating system Linux is a free-of-charge substitute to proprietary systems like Microsoft Windows. By using a cross-country data set, this paper finds evidence that increased piracy of proprietary software has a negative impact on adoption of desktop versions of Linux....

Some philosophers and social scientists have stressed the importance for good government of an altruistic citizenry that values the well being of one another. Others have emphasized the need for incentives that induce even the self interested to contribute to the public good. Implicitly most...

A common feature of the literature on the evolution of preferences is that evolution favors nonmaterialistic preferences only if preference types are observable at least to some degree. We argue that this result is due to the assumption that in each state of the evolutionary dynamics some...

Open source software (OSS) is marked by free access to the software and its source code. OSS is developed by a "community" consisting of thousands of contributors from all over the world. Some research was undertaken in order to analyze how global the OSS community actually is, i.e. analyze the...

The paper analyzes the impact of institutional and cultural factors on a remarkable economic activity: the production of so-called open source software (OSS). OSS is marked by free access to the software and its source code. Copyright-based OSS licenses permit users to use, change, improve and...

So-called open source software (OSS) is marked by free access to the software and its source code. Copyright-based OSS licenses permit users to use, change, improve and redistribute the software, which is designed and developed in a public, collaborative manner. High quality OSS products like...

This article contributes to research on the geographic origin of open source software (OSS) developers by analyzing the geographic allocation of active OSS developers and OSS activities. Based on data from the SourceForge Research Data Archive, the authors exploit information about developers'...

Open standards and open source have become essential for ICT markets from an innovation, business, technical, and policy approach. Openness is one of the core values in standardisation settings. When it comes to the definition of ‘open', some views have pointed to a ‘clear-cut' division...

We study the joint role of altruism and impatience, and the impact of evolution in the formation of long-term time preferences and in the determination of optimal consumption and optimal bequests. We show how the consumption paths of dynasties relate to altruism and to impatience and we reason...