Software is a product of human intellect and it would be appropriate to term it as “intellectual property.” Considering the pivotal role it plays in today’s world economy and development, protection of software is an important and crucial issue which needs to be dealt with. There has been...

There is a growing discussion of risks when software development is outsourced. In order to assess the extent of those risks, one needs to know the value of that concerned software. Software is an intangible good, and the value of intangibles is based on the income they are expected to generate...

Following the discussion on the role of Internet in the formation of ties across space, this paper seeks to supplement recent findings on location-dependent preferential attachment online. For this purpose, instead of looking at egonetworks, we look at networks of online communities specifically...

It is often presumed there are benefits from growing numbers of buyers and sellers around a platform, or “network effects.” While the benefits of more buyers are self-evident, the effects of ever-increasing numbers of sellers of complementary goods (“complementors”) perhaps deserve...

Previous studies suggested that a monopoly durable goods seller can use leasing to effectively avoid the time-inconsistent problem raised by Coase Conjecture. This paper extends those previous works by examining the monopoly seller's selling and leasing strategy for a special type of durable...

We analyze and compare fixed-fee and usage-fee software pricing schemes - in fixed-fee pricing, all users pay the same price; in usage-fee pricing, the users' fees depend on the amount that they use the software (e.g., the user of an online-database service might be charged for each data query)....

We present a framework for measuring software quality using pricing and demand data, and empirical estimates that quantify the extent of quality degradation associated with software versioning. Using a 7-month, 108-product panel of software sales from Amazon.com, we document the extent to which...

This paper analyzes and compares the investment incentives of platform and application developers for Linux and Windows. We find that the level of investment in applications is larger when the operating system is open source rather than proprietary. The comparison of the levels of investment in...

The "community-based" model has generated many of the innovations we use on a daily basis. The social structure created by this model has cultivated many entrepreneurial ventures and even seeded new industries and product categories. The model is based upon the open, voluntary, and collaborative...