Our study examines the impact of both a demand side factor (online user reviews) and a supply side factor (product variety) on the long tail and superstar phenomena in the context of online software downloading. The descriptive analysis suggests a significant superstar download pattern and also...

Open source software development may be superior to proprietary development because the open source organizational form naturally minimizes transactions costs associated with privately distributed information, thereby avoiding certain agency problems. This manifests itself in the ability of open...

In this paper, we examine global trajectories, dynamics, and tendencies of software piracy to ease the benchmarking of current efforts towards harmonizing the standards and enforcements of Intellectual Property Rights (henceforth IPRs) protection worldwide. Our empirical exercise is based on 15...

What, exactly, distinguishes a patent on a software innovation from patents on other kinds of innovations? While the question may appear esoteric at first glance, it is the crucial first step in any empirical study of software patents. The policy debate over software patents - whether they...

Indian software industry experienced a phenomenal growht throughout 1990s. In spite of worldwide recessionary trends in the software industry, Indian software industry is expected to play a much bigger role in the new millenium for the growht of Indian economy. In the light of the research...

This paper takes a look at the EU Unitary Patent from the United Kingdom's perspective, and considers it both generally and in terms of its impact for software. The paper argues that the EU Unitary Patent is a good step for patents in general and for software protection, but advises that...

Innovation requires sources of novelty, but the challenge is that not all sources lead to innovation, so its value needs to be determined. However, since ways of determining value stem from existing knowledge this often creates barriers to innovation. To understand how people address the...

An important provision in each of the final judgments in the government's Microsoft antitrust case requires Microsoft "make available" to software developers the communications protocols that Windows client operating systems use to interoperate "natively" (that is, without adding software) with...

Indirect network effects are of prime interest to marketers because they affect the growth and takeoff of software availability for, and hardware sales of, a new product. While prior work on indirect network effects in the economics and marketing literature is valuable, these literatures show...