Incentives for Developers’ Contributions and Product Performance Metrics in Open Source Development: An Empirical Exploration

Haruvy Ernan, Wu Fang and Sujoy Chakravarty ()

No 2005-03-04, IIMA Working Papers from Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, Research and Publication Department

Abstract: In open source software development, users rather than paid developers engage in innovation and development without the direct involvement of manufacturers. This paradigm cannot be explained by the two traditional models of innovation, the private investment model and the collective action model. Neither model in itself can explain the phenomenon of the open source model or its success. In order to bridge the gap between existing models and the open source phenomenon, we analyze data from a web survey of 160 open source developers. First, we investigate the motives affecting the individual developer’s contributions by comparing and contrasting the incentives from both the traditional private investment and collective action models. Second, we demonstrate that there is a common ground between the private and collective models where private returns and social considerations can coexist. Third, we explore the effect of incentives on the output of innovation—final product performance. The results show that the motivations for individual developer’s contributions are quite different from the incentives that affect product performance.

Keywords: Open Source Software; Incentives; Altruism; Developers’ Contributions; Software Performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec and nep-ino
Date: 2005-03-10
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/publications/data/2005-03-04sujoy.pdf English Version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iim:iimawp:2005-03-04

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IIMA Working Papers from Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, Research and Publication Department
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().