The broad aim of this paper is to gain some insight into the quantitative importance of reputation in e-commerce. We use an exhaustive data set from one of France’s largest e-commerce platforms, <a href="http://www.priceminister.com/">PriceMinister.com </a>, to estimate a statistical causal effect of a seller’s reputation (and size)...

Information intermediaries deliver information about a supplier's product. They are paid by those same suppliers they certify. This introduces conflicts of interests as the intermediaries want to retain customers by delivering truthful information about suppliers, while suppliers would want the...

Le terme `logiciel libre' désigne à la fois un bien -- le logiciel -- indispensable au fonctionnement des sociétés modernes informatisées, et un mode de production et de distribution -- libre. Ce mode de production et de distribution est suffisamment original pour poser des problèmes...

This is a case study of TeX, a typesetting software that was developed by Donald E. Knuth in the late 70's. Released with an open source license, it has become a reference in scientific publishing. TeX is now used to typeset and publish much of the world's scientific literature in physics and...

This paper examines the choice of license terms along the development of a piece of software. Three licenses are compared, the proprietary one, the Berkeley Software Distribution, and the General Public License. The choice of one or the other license depends on the characteristics of the...

A firm may allow customers to learn the value of its product prior to buying it. This increases their willingness to pay, even though it also leads some not to buy. That strategy may also be used as a competitive tool to increase its product's attractiveness. This paper examines competition...

The paper examines competition between two development models, proprietary and open-source (``OS''). It first defines and compares those two models and then analyzes the influence the development of one type of software has on the development of the other. The paper is based on the (La)TeX case...