[PLUTO-soci] Papers su aspetti economici del FOSS

[mmzz a pluto.it]

	Visto l'interesse recente sugli aspetti degli studi economici in 
	materia e sulle motivazioni, segnalo questi due paper. 
	Il primo e' molto tecnico, ma forse qualcuno ci capisce.
	Il secondo parla appunto delle motivazioni delle ditte italiane
	del ramo e della coerenza tra motivazioni e comportamento.
	
	Ho raccolto in una pagina alcune citazioni da altri paper
	che riguardano le motivazioni:
	<http://foss.stat.unipd.it/mediawiki/index.php/Motivazioni>

	ciao a tutti

		Alberto



Author Stefan Behringer

Title
The Provision of a Public Good with a direct Provision Technology and
Large Number of Agents
http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/behringer.pdf

Abstract
This paper provides a limit result for the provision of a public good
in a mechanism design framework as the number of agents gets large.
A canonical example for a public good that is produced with a direct
provision technology is Open Source Software.






Authors Cristina Rossi and Andrea Bonaccorsi

Title
Intrinsic motivations and profit-oriented firms in Open Source software.
Do firms practise what they preach?
http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/rossi_motivations.pdf

Abstract 
A growing body of economic literature is exploring the incentives of the
agents involved in the Open Source movement. However, most empirical
analyses focus on individual developers and neglect firms that do
business with Open Source software (Open Source firms). This paper
contributes to the literature by providing empirical evidence on the 
incentives of firms that engage in Open Source activities. Data on
firms? motivations were collected by a large-scale survey conducted on
146 Italian companies supplying Open Source (OS) solutions and show
that intrinsic, community-based incentives do play a role. Nevertheless,
these positive attitudes towards the values of the OS community, which
are quite surprising by profit-oriented firms, are not in general put
into practise. Discrepancy between attitudes and behaviours is a widely
investigated phenomenon in social psychology literature. We explore its
pattern in our sample, find that it does not concern all the
respondents, and single out a group of firms adopting a more consistent
behaviour. Our results are in line with the literature on individual
motivations in organisations and Open Source business models.