Competition and open source with perfect software compatibility

In this paper we study duopolistic competition between closed and open source software. Inspired by recent contributions on open source, we propose a two-stage game with perfect information and product differentiation, in which producers first set software quality and then determine prices (the price is zero for open source programs). We assume perfect software compatibility and model lock-in effects, a network externality component of software quality, and accumulation of experience in software use and implementation. In comparison to the monopolistic benchmark case, we argue that, in a duopoly created by the emergence of an open source program, the proprietary software producer will reduce its selling price if: (i) its network of users is larger than the open source network and its consumers are largely familiar with its program, (ii) it has a small network of unskilled consumers. On the other hand, the price of proprietary software will increase if its users form a large, but poorly-skilled network. Furthermore, we show that, in all of the above cases, the hedonic quality of proprietary software increases. Finally, by modeling experience accumulation processes through difference equations, we show that the ratio between the closed and open source programs’ opportunity costs for software learning and deployment plays a crucial role in shaping market outcomes. If open source software remains too complex and technical for unskilled or time-pressed users, a shared market solution, in which both programs are adopted, is likely to emerge. However, if opportunity costs in learning and understanding open source programs are particularly low, or at least equal to the opportunity costs of a closed-source program, then open source dominance emerges (i.e. markets tip to open source).     

科研经费腐败社会网络:属性、类型与结构

由于管理者和使用者分离,集体腐败逐渐演变为科研经费腐败行为的主流形式,越来越多地呈现出社会网络的相关结构及特征,因而可以将嵌入载体和运作路径作为解析科研经费腐败网络的两个重要变量。嵌入载体表达的是腐败网络建构和生成的场域,以此区分科研经费腐败行为中不同个体之间的联结机制究竟是通过公共权力还是私人关系,而运作路径则用于区分行为主体实施腐败的过程是直接或是间接。根据这两项重要变量,可以划分出4种不同结构的科研经费腐败网络类型,即公职人员自体腐败网络、公共组织寻租网络、科研人员自体腐败网络以及科研人员—中介网络,这4类科研经费腐败网络较为全面地概括出了当前我国科研经费腐败的共谋方式,据此提出了科研经费腐败防治的相关对策建议。     

技术供需主体的混合型多指标双边匹配决策方法

针对技术交易中技术供需主体满意度评价信息是多粒度语言评价信息、区间数、精确数的混合型多指标双边匹配决策问题,定义了技术供需主体的满意度函数,设计了最低可接受满意度选取规则,构建了双边匹配多目标优化模型,提出了实现技术供需主体双边匹配的决策方法。最后,通过算例,验证了该方法的有效性和可行性。     

Does Culture Drive Innovation and Export Quality?

Quality upgrading is important for two reasons: it helps us understand the determinants of trade flows between countries and it promotes economic development. We study the cultural determinants of export quality using Hofstede's four original cultural dimensions to provide hypotheses on R&D spending, patents per capita and export quality. We then employ three-stage least squares analysis and confirm our hypotheses. For example, we find uncertainty avoidance encourages small-scale continuous improvement initiatives and substantially increases export quality. Power distance and individualism increase export quality, while masculinity has a small impact on quality. Finally, we provide implications for understanding the direction of trade and developing policy.     

Intellectual property right protection in the software market

We discuss the software patent should be granted or not. There exist two types of coping in the software market; reverse engineering and software duplication. Software patent can prevent both types of copies since a patent protects an invention. If the software is not protected by a patent, software producer cannot prevent reverse engineering. However, the producer can prevent the software duplication by a copyright. It is not clear the software patent is socially desirable when we consider these two types of coping. We obtain the following results. First, the number of copy users under the patent protection is greater than that under the copyright protection. Second, the government can increase social welfare by applying copyright protection when the new technology is sufficiently innovative.     

Professional advice

This paper studies strategic communication by an expert who is concerned about appearing to be well informed. The expert is assumed to observe a private signal with a simple and particularly tractable (multiplicative linear) structure. The quality of the expert's information is evaluated on the basis of the advice given and the realized state of the world. In equilibrium of this reputational cheap-talk game, no more than two messages are effectively reported. The model is extended to consider sequential communication by experts with conditionally independent signals. In the long run, learning is incomplete and herd behavior arises.     

Adverse selection problems without the Spence-Mirrlees condition

This paper studies a class of one-dimensional screening problems where the agent's utility function does not satisfy the Spence-Mirrlees condition (SMC). The strength of the SMC for hidden information problems is to provide a full characterization of implementable contracts using only the local incentive compatibility (IC) constraints. These constraints are equivalent to the monotonicity of the decision variable with respect to the agent's unobservable one-dimensional parameter. When the SMC is violated the local IC constraints are no longer sufficient for implementability and additional (global) IC constraints have to be taken into account. In particular, implementable decisions may not be monotonic and discretely pooled types must have the same marginal utility of the decision (or equivalently, get the same marginal tariff). Moreover, at the optimal decision, the principal must preserve the same trade-off between rent extraction and allocative distortion measured in the agent's marginal rent unit. In a specific setting where non-monotone contracts may be optimal we fully characterize the solution.     

高质量创业：如何提高创业活动创新性？

随着创业普及率的提升,国家乃至整个社会亟需加强对创业质量的关注,鼓励高质量、创新型创业活动开展。但学者对于什么是创业活动创新性、应如何提升创业质量等问题的认识依然模糊。从技术与非技术双元创新角度,采用跨案例研究方法,探讨不同类型制造企业创新策略及其演化机制。结果发现,技术创新与非技术创新融合对于创业质量提升至关重要,非技术类创新是目前制造型企业提升创业质量的主要方式;其次,不同类型制造企业创新策略演化路径不同,但均体现出从用户需求出发、权衡新颖性与实用性要求、持续提升产品或服务增值能力的机制特征,这对揭示创业活动创新性来源、推动创业质量提升具有重要意义。     

Product Quality With Heterogeneous Consumers and Linear Pricing

This paper considers a linear‐pricing monopolist that conducts vertical product differentiation. Previous analyses consider customers who either have unit demand or firms who conduct nonlinear pricing. In this paper, customers’ opportunity cost of time generates a demand for quality. Customers differ in either their demand, income or taste for quality. Differences in income and taste for quality are sources of vertical differentiation. The presence of quality distortion and the variety that may exhibit it are dependent on the functional form of the customer types’ demand.     

The economics of crowd out under mixed public/private health insurance

It is well known that public insurance sometimes crowds out private insurance. Yet, the economic theory of crowd out has remained unstudied. Here, I show that crowd out causes two countervailing effects: (a) the intensive margin effect-since high demanders are crowded out, the private market now has a larger proportion of low demanders on the intensive margin (The intensive margin are those who have already bought private insurance), and so will drop quality to lower the price to the low demanders liking; and (b) the extensive margin effect-before the public insurance expansion, the private sector had lowered quality to make insurance more affordable at the extensive margin (The extensive margin is the next group of people who would buy private insurance if the price decreased), but now that public insurance crowds out the extensive margin, quality can then be raised back up to the high demanders liking.If the extensive margin effect dominates, then a new phenomenon of push out occurs, in which crowd out causes the private sector to raise quality and to increase the number of uninsured low demanders not eligible for public insurance. If the intensive margin effect dominates, then crowd out will cause the private sector to lower quality, causing the phenomenon of crowd-in, in which the number of uninsured low demanders that take-up private insurance increases.These two countervailing effects have important implications for any government policy that desires to eradicate all uninsurance. First, if push out is dominant, then the private sector will respond to the public insurance by pushing out and leaving some people newly uninsured. If crowd-in is dominant, then all people can be insured and the government can do it at a lower-than-anticipated level of expansion due to the private sector crowding in.Received: April 2002, Accepted: February 2003, JEL Classification: I11, I38The views herein do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of AHRQ, nor the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I thank Pedro Pita Barros, Hugh Gravelle, and Lise Rochaix-Ranson, and participants at the 2nd Health Economics Workshop at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa for helpful comments.     

开放源代码创新社群中的激励机制研究

通过对开放源代码创新社群内部创新机制的研究,阐述了激发用户创新和有效利用创新成果的激励机制,并从静态与动态两个维度分析了社群成员之间的相互作用与激励。     

土地市场扭曲如何影响制造业出口产品质量升级 ——基于土地市场交易数据和制造业企业数据的实证分析

地方政府“以地谋发展”的策略在促进各地区制造业大规模集聚和出口贸易快速增长的同时,也势必会给企业出口产品质量带来深刻影响。本文综合利用中国土地市场网城市土地交易数据、中国工业企业数据、中国海关进出口产品数据和中国城市面板数据,实证检验了土地市场扭曲对企业出口产品质量升级的影响,并对其内在机制进行了探讨。研究发现：中国城市建设用地配置存在明显的工业偏向性,进而导致工业用地价格被低估,产生工业用地应得收益大于实际价格的反向扭曲问题。这种反向扭曲可通过抑制技术进步、阻碍产业结构高级化、弱化集聚经济效应等机制显著降低制造业企业出口产品质量。土地市场扭曲对企业出口产品质量升级的影响具有明显的异质性特征。具体而言,土地市场扭曲不利于一般贸易企业与混合贸易企业出口产品质量提升,但对加工贸易企业出口产品质量提升具有促进作用。土地市场扭曲对企业出口产品质量升级的抑制作用由东到西依次递增。土地市场扭曲不利于外资企业和国有企业出口产品质量提升,对集体企业及民营企业的影响不显著。     

Contractual distortions in a market with frictions

This paper analyses contract design in a decentralized market environment with frictions. While principals (e.g., firms) have all contractual power, their market power is constrained as agents (e.g., workers) can choose to wait and search for better offers. We find that results depend crucially on how market frictions affect agents’ utilities. With type-independent costs of search and waiting, equilibrium contracts are always first-best. If agents are impatient and discount future payoffs, however, distortions vanish only gradually. In the latter case, we also characterize equilibrium offers and show that the market exhibits two types of externalities, both of which are absent in the case of type-independent costs of search.     

Cognition,Redundancy, And Learning In Organizations

What exactly does it mean for something to be an ‘organization’? How do we know when something is organized? What exactly is organizational learning? We attempt to attack some of these questions by turning to cybernetics and the mathematical theory of information In the work of Atlan and von Foerster we find provocative attempts to describe the processes of self-organization in terms of such variables as redundancy and information content. Using the running example of a monastery library we attempt to explicate these approaches and connect them to economic concerns.     

数据交易市场双边匹配模型与决策方法研究

针对平台视角下的数据交易供需双边匹配问题,基于双边匹配理论,提出了考虑模糊语言评价信息、区间数评价信息和0-1评价信息的混合型多属性匹配决策方法并定义了属性匹配满意度函数。以供需主体最大匹配满意度为目标,构建了数据交易供需双边匹配的多目标优化模型,并设计模型求解算法,将多目标化模型转化为单目标线性规划模型进行求解,以获取匹配结果。结果表明,通过对供需双方需求信息的详细分析,双边匹配结果能在最大程度上满足双方需求,同时,优化模型具有合理性及有效性。     

Copyright enforcement and product quality signaling in markets for computer software

This paper considers the impact of consumer copying of computer software when there is asymmetric information about product quality. In particular, the paper: (1) examines how the presence of copying can enhance the feasibility of production of high quality software when quality is a priori unknown to consumers and (2) explores the novel possibility that a software producer can signal product quality via its copyright enforcement decision. Under certain conditions, when there is asymmetric information about product quality, providers of high quality software can be made strictly better off with less than full copyright enforcement; in some cases, they do not produce at all in the absence of copying.     

On Giffen-like goods

This paper provides, as a counter example to the Alchian-Allen theorem, a theory of Giffen-like goods: a per unit charge to two similar goods raises the relative price of the lower quality good and yet increases the (relative) demand of the good.     

Non-marketed options, non-existence of equilibria, and non-linear prices

This paper presents a surprising example that shows that the lattice theoretic properties in Mas-Colell's (1986) seminal work are relevant to the existence of equilibrium even when the commodity space is finite dimensional.The example is a two-period securities model with a three-dimensional portfolio space and two traders. The paper identifies a non-marketed call option that fails to have a minimum cost super-replicating portfolio. Using this option, we construct an economy that satisfies all of Mas-Colell's assumptions, except that the three-dimensional commodity space is not a vector lattice. In this economy, there is no Walrasian equilibrium and the second theorem of welfare economics fails.Our example has important finite- as well as infinite-dimensional implications. It is also an example of a “well behaved” economy in which optimal allocations that are not supported by linear Walrasian prices are decentralized by the non-linear prices studied in Aliprantis-Tourky-Yannelis (2001).     

Current issues and research trends on open-source software communities

Open source software (OSS) projects represent a new paradigm of software creation and development based on hundreds or even thousands of developers and users organised in the form of a virtual community. The success of an OSS project is closely linked to the successful organisation and development of the virtual community of support group. This paper reviews different fields and research topics related to the OSS communities such as collective intelligence, the structure of OSS communities, their success, communities as virtual organisations, motivation, shared knowledge, innovation and learning. The main challenges, results obtained, and the knowledge areas are detailed for each topic.     

Core of convex distortions of a probability

This paper characterizes the core of a differentiable convex distortion of a probability measure on a nonatomic space by identifying it with the set of densities which dominate the derivative of the distortion, for second order stochastic dominance. The densities that have the same distribution as the derivative of the distortion are the extreme points of the core. These results are applied to the differentiability of a Yaari's or Rank Dependent Expected utility function. The superdifferential of a Choquet integral at any point is fully characterized. Examples of use of these results in simple models where some agent is a RDEU maximizer are given.