The open source software development model has been hailed as the most significant change in computing since Apple played David to IBM's Goliath. Yet, enterprises dedicated to bringing open source into the mainstream of the information economy have had a rough time finding ways to stay afloat...

In the wake of a series of court cases extending patents to software, open-source software proponents have proposed a number of arguments for limiting or even eliminating software patents. In particular, they claim that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has done a poor job of reviewing...

This paper examines arguments for and against the centralization of regulation,using the wireless communications industry as a case study. Several factors suggest that the burden increasingly ought to fall on proponents of decentralization. Scale, scope and network efficiencies are growing in...

A number of governments in Europe and elsewhere are considering or have considered recommending, requiring or mandating the internal use a particular document format standard, rather than allowing individual departments to choose for themselves or to select from some central government-approved...

This paper focuses on the role that business models play in cooperative standard setting. Certain business models, namely upstream specialists with no manufacturing of their own, have been vilified by some as patent trolls bent on exploiting the standard setting process. This view ignores...

While the "cashless society" has not yet fully become a reality, payment choices by consumers and merchants have been moving the U.S. economy in that direction slowly and steadily over the past five decades. In this study, a companion paper to Garcia-Swartz (2006a) in this volume, we lay out the...

Ever since the first general-purpose charge card debuted in the early 1950s, pundits have been predicting the "cashless society". Over fifty years later, we may finally be getting close to that vision. This study is the first to examine empirically the move toward a cashless society using a...

A number of methods exist for valuing a patent in order to license it to an external party. Several of these methods are well accepted in academic circles, others are merely tolerated as expedient. None of the existing methods, however, appears poised to easily accommodate software patent...

This paper investigates the economic and empirical foundations of the evidence relating earnings to schooling quality. We replicate the Card-Krueger model for Census years 1970, 1980 and 1990 and find that it consistently produces a strong relationship between schooling quality and the rate of...

This paper examines the economic and empirical foundations of the aggregate evidence on the effect of schooling quality on earnings. A common framework is presented which nests all previous studies as special cases. We discuss two crucial identifying assumptions and test them. The first...