Open source is an example of user-centric innovation initiated by an individual or group of users to satisfy their specific needs; the more a software evolves towards a stable release able to address the requirements of its developers, the more successful the project. In this paper we use a...

?We consider a cumulative innovation process in which a follow-on innovator invests in R&D activities that influence both the expected commercial value as well as the novelty of its innovation. When the second innovator investments are not servable,licensing of the first innovation never occurs...

In this paper we present a theoretical model to study the characteristics and the commerciaI sustainability of dual licensing, an open source (OS) business strategy that has gained popularity among software vendors. With dual licensing, a firm releases the same software product under both a...

In this paper, we prove that two firms can choose not to include a termination clause in their partnership contract, thus inducing a costly termination in case of failure of the joint project. This ex-post inefficiency induces partners to exert large non-contractible efforts (investments) to...

Thanks to a recent and vast empirical literature, we know in details how the most popular open source projects are organized and why they succeed. However, open source is not only Linux: in this paper we use a large data-set obtained from SourceForge.net to estimate the main determinants of the...

Dual licensing has proved to be a sustainable business model for various commercial software vendors employing open source strategies. In this paper we study the main characteristics of dual licensing and under which conditions it represents a profitable commercial strategy. We show that dual...

In a realistic framework where the potential innovators'; research lines are imperfectly correlated and imitation takes some time, this paper studies an industry regulated by an authority that can subsidize the firms' R&D expenditures. By comparing the market equilibrium emerging when there is...

We show that when designing a partnership agreement partner firms may prefer not to specify how to allocate the commonly owned assets should there be an early termination of the contract. By not including such a clause, firms induce litigation before a Court with positive probability. Firms...