Open source software development has organizational characteristics that are out of the ordinary (e.g., flatter hierarchy, self-organization, self-regulation, and no ownership structure). The study suggests that this organization of work can be explained by combining the recently developed...

Richard Langlois, Tony Yu & Paul Robertson (LYR) (2003) have assembled a collection of previously published papers that move beyond textbook production theory. This essay discusses work by Frank Knight and Hendrik Houthakker not reproduced in LYR in relation to the capability theory of economic...

Using the idea of modularity, we study the general phenomenon of open-source collaboration, which includes such things as collective invention and open science in addition to open-source software production. We argue that open-source collaboration coordinates the division of labor through the...

The paper analyzes voluntary Free Software/Open Source Software (FS/OSS) organization of work. The empirical setting considered is the Debian GNU/Linux operating system. The paper finds that the production process is hierarchical notwithstanding the modular (nearly decomposable) architecture of...

The paper revisits the socioeconomic theory of the Austrian School economist Ludwig M. Lachmann. By showing that the common claim that Lachmann’s idiosyncratic (read: eclectic and multidisciplinary) approach to economics entails nihilism is unfounded, it reaches the following conclusions. (1)...

The genuine problem of governance is one that pays equal attention to both incentive and knowledge issues in private and public contexts. This work brings together Austrian, Public Choice and theory of the firm insights to address such problem. By taking into account incentives and knowledge, it...

This work is a contribution to the Second Generation Theory (SGT) of fiscal federalism that studies fiscal federalism through contemporary economic and industrial organization theory. First, it establishes context by introducing the two classic motivations in support of federalism, namely,...

We summarize Francis Fukuyama’s State Building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty-first Century (London, Profile Books, 2005)and explore the limits of its arguments. State Building is a book with a very wide scope that essentially tries to “ground” and expand the fields of political...

The article turns to classical economic insights on the division of labor and to institutional reasoning to identify some costs and benefits of Open Source Software (OSS) and proprietary software production. It suggests that, thanks to its licenses, OSS favors market expansion more than...