The principles of open collaboration for innovation and production — once distinctive to open source software — are now found in many other ventures. Some of these ventures are internet-based: Wikipedia, online forums and communities; others are off-line, in medicine, science, and everyday...

Sheen S. Levine, Trish Gorman, and Michael J. Prietula study how corporate performance is affected by peer-to-peer sharing, instances when people supplement their knowledge by interacting with others. Popular wisdom holds that such interaction benefits performance unequivocally, but the authors...