Equilibrium Selection and Public-good Provision: The Development of Open-source Software

Collective-action problems arise in a variety of situations.Open-source software is a recent and important example. Copyrightrestrictions on open-source projects stipulate that any usermay modify the software so long as any resulting innovationis freely available to all. In economic parlance, the innovationis a public good. The economic theory of public-good provisionraises a number of important questions. Who contributes to sucha project, and who free rides? How might a social planner exploitthe interdependence of project components to encourage contributions?Under what conditions will such actions result in successfulprovision? Using a simple game-theoretic framework and recentresults from the study of equilibrium selection, we attemptto answer these questions. Under reasonable assumptions of asymmetryand less than complete information, the most efficient providerswill contribute. Contributions can be elicited by ‘integrating’the provision process when providers are sufficiently optimisticabout the success of the project. Otherwise, the social plannermay be better off ‘separating’ the components sothat individual contributions are independent of each other.The analysis yields recommendations for the leaders of open-sourceprojects and other similar collective-action problems.     

Virtual Environments and the Acceleration of Experiential Learning

Darius et al. (2007) and Nolan & Temple Lang (2007) give examples of virtual environments that can, for specific purposes, substitute for the real world. We are in the early stages of developments that could revolutionize statistics education by making it possible to capture efficiently important aspects of the thinking and practice of professional statisticians previously learned only from long years of experience. The ability of virtual environments to automate processes provides a potent weapon for tackling the tyranny that Time exercises over such modes of learning. We discuss the many new possibilities that are opened up by virtual environments together with cognitive and pedagogical imperatives to be addressed to ensure that environments actually do teach the lessons they were designed to teach. We echo Nolan and Temple Lang's call for the development of environments to be modular and open source. Taking the R‐project as a model, this can lead to a growing repository of building blocks that make the construction of future environments less costly, thus facilitating the realization of more and more ambitious conceptions.     

The Regulation of Professional Migration: Insights from the Health and IT Sectors in ASEAN

This paper develops several indicators to measure the extent and depth of rules governing international migration. It is set in the context of moves towards further liberalisation of services trade and associated labour mobility (Mode 4) under GATS and related regional trading arrangements. Ten Southeast Asian countries at various stages of economic development are examined as a case study, with special reference to health care and information technology. These sectors are priority sectors for regional cooperation in services trade in ASEAN, but were expected to represent opposite extremes in terms of the regulation of migration. The study finds that the more advanced countries tend to have more liberal regimes for international movements of skilled manpower, although there were smaller differences regarding general visa and work permit arrangements. Generic restrictions on mobility were related to trade policies, as well as to direct barriers (often country‐specific) to migration. They included minimum salary requirement, levies on foreign workers, economic needs tests, and limitations related to language, education and job experience. Controls were more extensive in the health care sector, related to social considerations as well as professional organisational interests.