Some philosophers and social scientists have stressed the importance for good government of an altruistic citizenry that values the well being of one another. Others have emphasized the need for incentives that induce even the self interested to contribute to the public good. Implicitly most...

A common feature of the literature on the evolution of preferences is that evolution favors nonmaterialistic preferences only if preference types are observable at least to some degree. We argue that this result is due to the assumption that in each state of the evolutionary dynamics some...

A common feature of the literature on the evolution of preferences is that evolution favors nonmaterialistic preferences only if preference types are observable at least to some degree. We argue that this result is due to the assumption that in each state of the evolutionary dynamics some...

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...

Modern software development involves collaborative efforts and re-use of existing software packages and libraries, to reduce the cost of developing new software. However, package dependencies expose developers to the risk of contagion from bugs or other vulnerabilities. We study the formation of...

For a decade, economists have been fascinated by the phenomenon of open source software (OSS). OSS is marked by free access to the software and its source code. It is developed in a public, collaborative manner by thousands of non-paid volunteers as well as profit seeking firms. Today, OSS is...

For a decade, economists have been fascinated by the phenomenon of open source software (OSS). OSS is marked by free access to the software and its source code. It is developed in a public, collaborative manner by thousands of non-paid volunteers as well as profit seeking firms. Today, OSS is...

Open source software (OSS) is marked by free access to the software and its source code. OSS is developed by a "community" consisting of thousands of contributors from all over the world. Some research was undertaken in order to analyze how global the OSS community actually is, i.e. analyze the...

The paper analyzes the impact of institutional and cultural factors on a remarkable economic activity: the production of so-called open source software (OSS). OSS is marked by free access to the software and its source code. Copyright-based OSS licenses permit users to use, change, improve and...