This paper examines the questions of who participates in the provision of a public good through the voluntary participation of agents in the presence of strong complementarity between a public good and a private good. We show that the greater the initial endowment of the private good that agents...

This paper examines the questions of who participates in the provision of a public good through the voluntary participation of agents in the presence of strong complementarity between a public good and a private good. We show that the greater the initial endowment of the private good that agents...

This paper studies the impact of ambiguity in the best shot and weakest link models of public good provision. The models are first analysed theoretically. Then we conduct experiments to study how ambiguity affects behaviour in these games. We test whether subjects' perception of ambiguity...

Much of today's software relies on programming code shared openly online. Yet, it is unclear why volunteer developers contribute to open-source software (OSS), a public good. We study OSS contributions of some 22,900 developers worldwide on the largest online code repository platform, GitHub,...

Much of today’s software relies on programming code shared openly online. Yet, it is unclear why volunteer developers contribute to open-source software (OSS), a public good. We study OSS contributions of some 22,900 developers worldwide on the largest online code repository platform, GitHub,...

This paper looks at price and quality competition in software markets under two different forms of competition - one where two proprietary firms first choose quality and then engage in price competition, and second where a proprietary firm faces competition from an open source software firm that...

Explaining the evolution and maintenance of cooperation among unrelated individuals is one of the fundamental problems in biology and the social sciences. Recent experimental evidence suggests that altruistic punishment is an important mechanism to maintain cooperation among humans. In this...

Open source software (OSS) is a public good. A self-interested individual would consider providing such software, if the benefits he gained from having it justified the cost of programming. Nevertheless each agent is tempted to free ride and wait for others to develop the software instead. This...

This paper studies the role of commitment in the design of enforcement mechanisms when enforcement can remedy harm from non-compliance. We consider a game between an enforcement authority ("enforcer") and an offender in which either the enforcer or the offender may act as a Stackelberg leader....