There is considerable debate regarding the use of intellectual property rights (IPR) to spur innovation in the software industry. In this paper we focus on the choice of intellectual property right regimes and industry growth. We begin by developing a growth optimal mixture of open source and...

There is considerable debate regarding the use of intellectual property rights (IPR) to spur innovation in the software industry. In this paper we focus on the choice of intellectual property right regimes and industry growth. We begin by developing a growth optimal mixture of open source and...

This paper studies the role of intrinsic motivation, reputation and reciprocity in driving open source software innovation. We exploit the observed pattern of contributions – the ‘revealed preference' of developers - to infer the underlying incentives. Using detailed information on code...

In this paper I study how innovation investment in a software duopoly is affected by the fact that one of the firms is, or might become Open Source. Firms can either be proprietary source (PS) or open source (OS), and have different initial technological levels. An OS firm is a for profit...

In this paper I study how innovation investment in a software duopoly is affected by the fact that one of the firms is, or might become Open Source. Firms can either be proprietary source (PS) or open source (OS) and have different initial technological levels. An OS firm is a for profit...

An extensive empirical literature indicates that, even without formal intellectual property rights, innovators enjoy a variety of first-mover advantages and that `imitation' is itself a costly activity. There is also accumulating evidence that an `open' approach to knowledge production can...

Drawing insights from the field of innovation economics, we discuss the likely competitive environment shaping generative AI advances. Central to our analysis are the concepts of appropriability--whether firms in the industry are able to control the knowledge generated by their innovations--and...

We develop a multistage game in which firms do cumulative R&D to complete a lengthy process, and we study whether firms patent intermediate results or release them in Open Source. A patent holder obtains a larger reward in the market, but since in equilibrium it forecloses R&D it remains alone...

We discuss welfare and various policy interventions for mixed ICT markets where firms use either 'open source' (OS) or 'closed source' (CS) business models. We find that the existence of OS business models improves social welfare compared to all-CS industries by letting firms share costs and...

Practitioners generally assert that collaboration with the Open Source software (OSS) community enables young software firms to achieve superior innovation performance. Nonetheless, to the best of our knowledge, scholars have never extensively speculated about this assertion or rigorously tested...