We live in a dynamic economic and commercial world, surrounded by objects of remarkable complexity and power. In many industries, changes in products and technologies have brought with them new kinds of firms and forms of organization. We are discovering news ways of structuring work, of...

This paper argues that the architecture of a codebase is a critical factor that lies at the heart of the open source development process. We define two observable properties of an architecture: (1) modularity and (2) option value. Developers can often make informed judgments about modularity and...

Our goal in this paper is to explain the location of transactions (and contracts) in a larger system of production. We first characterize the system as a network of tasks and transfers. While transfers between agents are necessary and ubiquitous, the mundane transaction costos of standardizing,...

Our goal in this paper is to explain the location of transactions (and contracts) in a system of production. Systems of production are engineered systems, and where to place quot;transactionsquot; is one of the basic engineering problems that the designers of such systems face. We begin by...

When the design of an artifact is quot;modularized,quot; the elements of the design are split up and assigned to modules according to a formal architecture or plan. Some of the modules are quot;hidden,quot; meaning that design decisions in those modules do not affect decisions in other modules;...

In quot;Managing in the Age of Modularity,quot; which was written in June 1997 and appeared in the Harvard Business Review, we proposed that a new technological phenomenon, the modular design of complex computer systems, caused the emergence of a large modular cluster of firms and markets in the...