Call for Papers – Fourth FLOSS Workshop

The Fourth FLOSS Workshop will take place in Jena (Germany) on July 1 and 2, 2010.

The call for papers is available at http://floss2010.pbworks.com, and can be downloaded at http://floss2010.pbworks.com/f/Call+for+Papers.pdf.

The theme of the workshop will be “Business models, social networks
and collaborative knowledge development”.

Two special guests will give introductory lectures about their research in that domain: Jürgen Bitzer will present his research on “Returns to Open Source Software Engagement: An Empirical Test of the Signaling Hypothesis”, and Rebeca Méndez-Durón will present her paper “Returns from Social Capital in Open Source Software Networks”.

Information about Jena is available on the workshop’s website (links at the top). Jena is a very pleasant and very old university town in what used to be East Germany. It is very well linked by high-speed trains from Berlin, Frankfurt and Munich.

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Spurious Complexity and Common Standards in Markets for Consumer Goods

This is a new version of the 2007 paper with the same title.

We think about situations in which consumers make mistakes when confronted with complex decision problems. A firm may then make its offer unnecessarily difficult to understand to confuse some consumers into mistakenly preferring its product, even when its product is in fact indistinguishable from the competition.

We model a force that may keep a firm from trying to confuse consumer: If consumers only choose among the most easily comparable options, then firms that do not follow common conventions in presenting their product will suffer.

Because the products of firms that follow such common conventions are directly comparable, their prices will be lower than those of firms that do not adopt the common standard. This means that consumers who use the ‘common standard heuristic’ (i.e. who choose only among firms that adopt the common standard) will be better off than others. This also means that a firm that moves away from the common standard thus signals higher prices.

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Public and private provision of public and private goods

Public and private provision of public and private goods. Presentation made on August 26th, 2009 at the 24th Congress of the European Economic Association in Barcelona, of the paper entitled “Consumer Welfare and Market Structure in a Model of Competition between Open Source and Proprietary Software“.

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Open source software and innovation

Open source software and innovation. Presentation made on August 3, 2009 at the 3rd Jena Summer Academy on “Innovation and Uncertainty”. How much innovation is there in open source software? How efficient is the open-source development model? Could open source software be a threat to innovation, or does it rather support and accelerate proprietary innovation?

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A (Micro) Course in Microeconomic Theory for MSc Students

Those lecture notes cover the basics of a course in microeconomic theory for MSc students in Economics. They were developed over five years of teaching MSc Economic Theory I in the School of Economics at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK.

The programme of this course is divided in three parts; choice under uncertainty, game theory and incentive theory. The whole of the course can be covered in sixteen hours of teaching, along with eight hours of workshops, over eight weeks. The lectures differ from the standard fare in their emphasis on utility theory and its alternatives.

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Bloggers who reciprocate readership have more readers

Press release for “Blogs and the economics of reciprocal attention“, presented at the 2009 Royal Economic Society conference at the University of Surrey on the 21st of April.

Excerpt: “A study of LiveJournal, the blog host, illustrates how important it is for a blogger to read and link to other bloggers in order to gain popularity and readership. Attention in the blogging economy is won by paying attention to others. This paper explores how bloggers measure the terms of trade in the “attention economy” and shows a stigma is attached to not reciprocating links and comments from fellow bloggers.”

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New version of “Blogs and the Economics of Reciprocal Attention”

This new version of “Blogs and the Economics of Reciprocal Attention” exploits a wider data set and clarifies the way exchange of reciprocal attention between bloggers occurs. We argue that attention to one’s blog is won by paying attention to other bloggers. We derive properties of blogging networks from a model where bloggers trade attention and content.

The predictions from the model are then checked against a novel dataset from LiveJournal, a major blogging community. As predicted, the activity of a bloggers is found to be related to the size and level of reciprocity within that blogger’s network of relations. We also find that bloggers who do not adhere to reciprocity norms are sanctioned with a lower number of readers.

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Blogs and the Economics of Reciprocal Attention

A novel dataset from a major blogging community, Livejournal, is used to show that bloggers who have a large audience, and are read by more people than they read, are likely to be producing more content and be more interactive than other bloggers. However, a stigma is attached to those bloggers who do not reciprocate links.

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Competition from open source software improves social welfare

Open source software, when it competes with proprietary software, makes software users better off than proprietary software alone could. Conversely, proprietary software, by competing with open source software, guarantees better social outcomes than if open source existed alone.

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Software marketing and shareware repositories

This paper examines one of the most important marketing strategies by software producers on the Internet. That is whether to offer free samples and if so, whether to list the samples on shareware repositories. I show that less well known firms with the best products will list on shareware repositories, but better known firms will not.

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