The article investigates the allocation of collaborative efforts among core developers (maintainers) of open source software by analyzing on-line development traces (logs) for a set of 10 large projects. We specifically investigate whether the division of labor within open-source projects is...

This essay deals with the challenge that international organizations face at the turn of the millennium. The basic insight from the theory of clubs and information theory is that coordination and cooperation require dominant providers. Cooperation becomes more difficult as players become more...

One of the most frequent questions asked by economists is how individual members of societies make choices. It can be observed that economic agents imitate other agents' actions. It should be asked why rational people choose to imitate other's behaviour and make decisions that are not based on...

Government intervention often gives rise to contests and the government can influence their outcome by choosing their type. We consider a contest with two interest groups: one that is governed by a central planner and one that is not. Rent dissipation is compared under two well-known contest...

Social scientists have long investigated the roles of citizens' civic attitudes and associational life in democracies. Yet, it remains to be fully elucidated whether their attitudes and activities not only influence but also are influenced by the political process in democracies. To address this...

This paper considers the problem of allocating an amount of a perfectly divisible resource among agents. We are interested in rules eliminating the possibility that an agent can compensate another to misrepresent her preferences, making both agents strictly better off. Such rules are said to be...

This study investigates how online content appropriation is affected by the content type and the social environment, i.e., the norms imposed by the website, and the social relationships. My analysis uses Pinterest data from April and November 2012 with a differences-in-differences methodology to...

We propose a class of decisive collective choice rules that rely on a linear ordering to partition the majority relation into two acyclic relations. The first of these relations is used to pare down the set of the feasible alternatives into a shortlist while the second is used to make a final...

For division problems with single-peaked preferences, we show that all sequential allotment rules, a large subfamily of strategy-proof and efficient rules, are also obviously strategy-proof. Although obvious strategy-proofness is in general more restrictive than strategy-proofness, this is not...

We study ex post implementation in collective decision problems where monetary transfers cannot be used. We find that deterministic ex post implementation is impossible if the underlying environment is neither almost an environment with private values nor almost one with common values. Thus,...