This paper presents a model on the viability and persistence of open and closed-source productions in the software industry. Starting from some empirical evidence on the degree of organizational diversity that characterizes this sector of the economy, the paper asks one main question: why do...

I study the incentives of Cournot duopolists to share their technologies with their competitor in markets where intellectual property rights are absent and imitation is costless. The trade-off between a signaling effect and an expropriation effect determines the technology-sharing incentives. In...

An important reason for the Internet's remarkable growth over the last quarter century is the "end-to-end" principle that networks should confine themselves to transmitting generic packets without worrying about their contents. Not only has this made deployment of internet infrastructure cheap...

Distributed ledger technology, invented for cryptocurrencies, is increasingly understood as a new general-purpose technology for a broad range of economic activities that rely on consensus of a database of transactions or records. However, blockchains are more than just a disruptive new ICT....

In a technology-driven, digital world, many of the largest and most successful businesses now operate as “platforms.” Such firms leverage networked technologies to facilitate economic exchange, transfer information, connect people, and make predictions. Platform companies are already...

Cryptocurrencies are based on cryptography-based asset disposals broadcasted peer-to-peer to be validated decentrally according to consensus mechanisms in compliance with consented protocols. Protocol development is associated with risks, and there are conflicts of interests. Collusion involving...

In this paper we investigate the ways in which new forms of organization enabled by digital technologies such as crowdsourcing and digital marketplaces are allowing firms to circumvent and defy traditional knowledge constraints. This is part of the broader question of when and why these forms of...

This paper investigates how much of the persistence in Windows usage is due to lock-in or unobserved preferences. While the hypothesis of lock-in plays an important role in the antitrust policy debate for the operating systems market, it has not been extensively documented empirically. In this...

This paper presents preliminary results from a pilot experiment dealing with the economic motivations to contribute to Free/Open Source Software (FOSS). In a seminal paper Bessen and Maskin (2006) argue that in a dynamic sequential innovation framework in which every innovation builds on...

This chapter suggests a rationale for a simple, scalable, and fast computational approach through the ‘Data With Direction Specification’ (DWDS) to supplement the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). The specification provides a way for digitally executable...