software involved. We provide empirical evidence that F/OSS support is stronger in countries i) where e-government services are more largely available, and ii) where the domestic software industry is lagging behind. This evidence supports common views among F/OSS advocates.

This text rigorously blends theory with real-world applications to study the industrial organisation of the ICT sector. Each of the self-contained chapters, which can be studied in isolation, contains theoretical models that are presented in a clear and accessible way. Throughout, a series of...

The theoretical literature on the cumulative innovation process has emphasized the role of ex-ante licensing – namely, licensing agreements negotiated before the follow-on innovator has sunk its R&D investment – in mitigating the risk of hold-up of future innovations. In this paper, we...

In this paper we present a theoretical model to study the characteristics and the commercial sustainability of dual licensing, an open source (OS) business strategy that has gained popularity among software vendors. With dual licensing, a firm releases the same software product under both a...

This paper analyses the impact of public policies supporting open source software (OSS). Users can be divided between those who know about the existence of OSS, the "informed" adopters, and the "uninformed" ones; the presence of uniformed users yields to market failures that justify government...

Thanks to a recent and vast empirical literature, we know in details how the most popular open source projects are organized and why they succeed. However open source is not only Linux: in this paper we use a large data-set obtained from SourceForge.net to estimate the main determinants of the...

We show that when designing a partnership agreement partner firms may prefer not to specify how to allocate the commonly owned assets should there be an early termination of the contract. By not including such a clause, firms induce litigation before a Court with positive probability. Firms...