Suchergebnisse

This paper considers a dynamic model of the evolution of open source software projects, focusing on the evolution of quality, contributing programmers, and users who contribute customer support to other users. Programmers who have used open source software are motivated by reciprocal altruism to publish their own improvements. The evolution of the open-source project depends on the form of the altruistic benefits: in a base case the project grows to a steady-state size from any initial condition; whereas adding a need for customer support makes zero-quality a locally absorbing state. We also analyze competition by commercial firms with OSS projects. Optimal pricing policies again vary: in some cases the commercial firm will set low prices when the open-source project is small; in other cases it mostly waits until the open-source project has matured.

"How much discretion should the monetary authority have in setting its policy? This question is analyzed in an economy with an agreed-upon social welfare function that depends on the randomly fluctuating state of the economy. The monetary authority has private information about that state. In the model, well-designed rules trade off society's desire to give the monetary authority discretion to react to its private information against society's need to guard against the time inconsistency problem arising from the temptation to stimulate the economy with unexpected inflation. Although this dynamic mechanism design problem seems complex, society can implement the optimal policy simply by legislating an inflation cap that specifies the highest allowable inflation rate. The more severe the time inconsistency problem and the less important is private information, the smaller is the optimal degree of discretion. As either the time inconsistency problem becomes sufficiently severe or private information becomes sufficiently unimportant, the optimal degree of discretion is none"--Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis web site

Researchers often report estimates and standard errors for the object of interest (such as a treatment effect) based on a single specification of a statistical model. We propose a systematic approach to assessing sensitivity to specification. We construct estimates of the object of interest for each of a large set of models. Our proposed robustness measure is the standard deviation of the point estimates over the set of models. Each member of the set is generated by splitting the sample into two subsamples based on covariate values, constructing separate parameter estimates for each subsample, and then combining the results.

This paper considers a dynamic model of the evolution of open source software projects, focusing on the evolution of quality, contributing programmers, and users who contribute customer support to other users. Programmers who have used open source software are motivated by reciprocal altruism to publish their own improvements. The evolution of the open-source project depends on the form of the altruistic benefits: in a base case the project grows to a steady-state size from any initial condition; whereas adding a need for customer support makes zero-quality a locally absorbing state. We also analyze competition by commercial firms with OSS projects. Optimal pricing policies again vary: in some cases the commercial firm will set low prices when the open-source project is small; in other cases it mostly waits until the open-source project has matured.