Voluntary Pooled Public Knowledge Goods and Coalition Formation

Tom Dedeurwaerdere () and Paolo Melindi-Ghidi
Additional contact information
Tom Dedeurwaerdere: FNRS and UNIVERSITE CATHOLIQUE DE LOUVAIN

No 2013020, LIDAM Discussion Papers IRES from Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES)

Abstract: In this paper we develop a theoretical model of the mechanisms behind the voluntary provision of public knowledge goods in coalitions in presence of social preferences. The model builds on the large empirical literature on voluntary production of pooled public knowledge goods, such as source code in communities of software developers or data voluntarily provided to open access data repositories. This literature shows that the provision of public goods is strongly dependent on the presence of social preferences such as group identity and social approval of individual pro-social attitudes. To integrate these effects in standard public good theory this paper builds a private-collective model of public good provision, where contribution to public knowledge goods generates both public and exclusive private benefits for the members of the coalition only. The analysis shows that, when the private benefit is important, the effect of the social preferences on the coalition formation is ambiguous. In particular, in the latter case, in presence of strong individual reputational effects, the public knowledge goods will be more difficult to produce. The comparison of the predictions of the theoretical model with the stylized facts of large scale surveys of Free/Libre/Open-Source (FLOSS) software developers confirms the results of the model.

Keywords: coalition formation; private-collective model; social group identity; pro-social reputation; public knowledge goods; social dilemma (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 H42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38
Date: 2013-09-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cdm, nep-mic, nep-net, nep-pbe, nep-pol and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://sites.uclouvain.be/econ/DP/IRES/2013020.pdf (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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ctl:louvir:2013020

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LIDAM Discussion Papers IRES from Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES) Place Montesquieu 3, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Virginie LEBLANC ().