Concerns have been expressed that gene patents might result in restricted access to research and health care. The exponential growth of patents claiming human DNA sequences might result in patent thickets, royalty stacking and, ultimately, a ‘tragedy of the anti-commons’ in genetics. The...

We consider software developers who can either work on an open sourceproject or on a closed source project. The former provides a publiclyavailable signal about their talent, whereas the latter provides asignal only observed by their employer. We show that a talented employeemay initially prefer...

Enforcing adherence to standards in software development in order to produce high quality software artefacts has long been recognised as best practice in traditional software engineering. In a distributed heterogeneousdevelopment environment such those found within the Open Source paradigm,...

The primary findings of our study suggest that software firms that adopt the OSS-based business model are notably less productive than companies that merely offer proprietary software solutions. Our estimation results further show that the OSS business model adopters have not become notably less...

I investigate the effect of open source on standardization outcomes in a market with positive network externalities. In a closed source world, it seems reasonable to assume that the probability of a standard being chosen is positively correlated with its quality. Open source may weaken or invert...

We consider software developers who can either work on an open source project or on a closed source project. The former provides a publicly available signal about their talent, whereas the latter provides a signal only observed by their employer. We show that a talented employee may initially...