This paper examines the incentive of unpaid programmers to contribute to open source software (OSS) projects in order to signal their talents. The analysis shows that if programmers contribute to OSS projects at all, then generically there are multiple equilibria. In these equilibria, an...

Job-Market signaling is ranked high among the explanations why individuals engage voluntarily in OSS projects. If true, signaling implies the existence of a wage premium for OSS engagement. However, due to a lack of data this issue has not been tested previously. Based on a novel data set...

This paper seeks to close an empirical gap regarding the motivations, personal attributes and behavioral patterns among free/libre and open source (FLOSS) developers, especially those involved in community-based production, and considers the bearing of its findings on the existing literature and...

Much of today’s software relies on programming code shared openly online. Yet, it is unclear why volunteer developers contribute to open-source software (OSS), a public good. We study OSS contributions of some 22,900 developers worldwide on the largest online code repository platform, GitHub,...

Much of today's software relies on programming code shared openly online. Yet, it is unclear why volunteer developers contribute to open-source software (OSS), a public good. We study OSS contributions of some 22,900 developers worldwide on the largest online code repository platform, GitHub,...