Motivation and Sorting in Open Source Software Innovation

Sharon Belenzon and Mark Schankerman

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: This paper studies the role of intrinsic motivation, reputation, and reciprocity in driving open source software innovation. Unlike previous literature based on survey data, we exploit the observed pattern of contributions - the .revealed preference. of developers - to infer the underlying incentives driving the decision to contribute source code. Using detailed information on code contributions and project membership, we classify software developers into distinct types and study how contributions from each developer type vary according to the open source license type and other project characteristics. We find that developers strongly sort by license type, project size, and corporate sponsorship, and that reciprocity is important only for a small subset of projects. We also show that contributions have a substantial impact on the performance of open source projects.

Keywords: open source software; innovation; incentives; intrinsic motivation; motivated agents; reputation; reciprocity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L14 L17 L41 O31 O32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ino, nep-ipr and nep-pr~
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp0893.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Motivation and Sorting in Open Source Software Innovation (2008)
Working Paper: Motivation and Sorting in Open Source Software Innovation (2008)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp0893

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