The software industry frequently maintains that software piracy is no more than theft and a cause of huge losses. Courts and other policy makers easily adopt that straightforward argument. Surprisingly, however, many software publishers do not employ any technological measures to protect their...

Economic analysis often reviews the role of principles - such as respect for intellectual property rights - in driving innovation. Given the interdependent nature of innovation in information technology, three core principles have emerged that work together to ensure that complementary,...

Distributing freeware or trialware is a common practice of most publishers in the software market in order to increase potential users' experience prior to their final purchasing. Third-party rating of new software is an objective quality reference to the users as well. We develop an empirical...

Product sampling is a part of promotion tools to increase the sales of goods. Especially, the marginal sampling cost for consumer is close to zero in software market since consumers may download a freeware or trial version of the focal product easily through the internet. Unlike other consumable...

One of the puzzling aspects of open source software (OSS) development is its public good nature. Individual developers contribute to developing the software, but do not hold the copyright to appropriate its value. This raises questions regarding motives behind such effort. We provide an...

Public choice scholars have claimed that antitrust, like all forms of regulation, is not about advancing the public good, but is instead about advancing private interests that have special influence on legislative and administrative processes. This article, published in 1999, uses the Microsoft...

PowerPoint has come to dominate organizational life in general and strategy making in particular. The technology is lauded by its proponents as a powerful tool for communication and excoriated by its critics as dangerously simplifying. This study takes a deeper look into how PowerPoint is...

There has been a recent surge of interest in open source software development, which involves developers at many different locations and organizations sharing code to develop and refine programs. To an economist, the behavior of individual programmers and commercial companies engaged in open...

Enterprise software systems are required to be highly reliable as they are central to the business operations of most firms. However, configuring and maintaining these systems can be highly complex, making it challenging to achieve high reliability. Resource constrained software teams facing...

We study how the strength of public intellectual property rights (IPR) protection against software piracy (copyright protection) affects private IPR protection (that software developers may themselves undertake to protect their IPR). There are two software developers that offer a product variety...