Open source is key to innovation, but we know little about how to incentivize it. In this paper, we examine the impact of a program providing monetary incentives to motivate innovators to contribute to open source. The Sponsors program was introduced by GitHub in May 2019 and enabled...

This article provides an overview of the competitive issues surrounding online platforms. The general theme is that while much has been made of the structural features of online platforms there is little hard evidence that these are durable monopolies. Nonetheless, there are concerns about the...

We study an e-commerce platform’s incentive to enter the credit market and offer loans for vendors’ innovations. The platform earns from both its lending ac- tivity and fees collected on transactions in the marketplace. If the platform does not offer loans, it might find it convenient to...