Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
PreprintCited by 90Open Source Software InnovationsDigital Platforms and EconomicsSoftware Engineering Techniques and Practices

The DOI matches its Crossref record.

Collaboration, Peer Review and Open Source Software

Open access
Johnson, Justin·2004·Information Economics and Policy
DOI 10.2139/ssrn.535022
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Open source software development may be superior to proprietary development because the open source organizational form naturally minimizes transactions costs associated with privately distributed information, thereby avoiding certain agency problems. This manifests itself in the ability of open source communities to encourage collaborative sharing of ideas and critical peer review. When these activities are important, the open source organizational form endogenously may do better than a proprietary organizational form. The desire to improve quality by circumventing such agency concerns may induce the founder of a software project to choose the open source form even though doing so foregoes potential profits, and this effect is magnified when there is an existing competing closed source project. The types of software best suited to open source development are identified.

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.2139/ssrn.535022

Cites

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

We couldn’t retrieve this paper’s full text, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Citations

Cites

No references could be resolved yet.

Research works printed but not linked: 44

  1. A Alchian, 1972, Production, information costs, and economic organization, American Economic Review, 62, 777, 10.1017/cbo9780511817410.015 · DOI
  2. C Ashbacher, 2001, Review of 'Peer Reviews in Software: A Practical Guide, Journal of Object Technology, 121
  3. E Auriol, 2002, Career Concerns in Teams, Journal of Labor Economics, 20, 289, 10.1086/338240 · DOI
  4. S Baliga, 2001, Optimal Design of Peer Review and Self-Assessment Schemes, Rand Journal of Economics, 32, 27, 10.2307/2696396 · DOI
  5. J Bessen, 2002, Open Source Software: Free Provision of Complex Public Goods, 10.2139/ssrn.588763 · DOI
  6. B W Boehm, 1981, Software Engineering Economics
  7. F P Brooks, 1995, The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
  8. R H Coase, 1937, The nature of the firm, Economica, 4, 386, 10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937.tb00002.x · DOI · Paper page
  9. T Demarco, 1999, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
  10. M Dewatripont, 1999, The Economics of Career Concerns, Part I: Comparing Information Structures, Review of Economic Studies, 66, 183, 10.1111/1467-937x.00084 · DOI
  11. I Erikkson, 1991, A Model for IS Quality, Software Engineering Journal, 152, 10.1049/sej.1991.0018 · DOI
  12. M Fagan, 1976, Design and code inspections to reduce errors in program development, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 15, 744, 10.1147/sj.153.0182 · DOI
  13. C Fershtman, 2004, The Determinants of Output Per Contributor in Open Source Projects: An Empirical Examination, 10.2139/ssrn.515282 · DOI
  14. A Gaudeul, 2003, Open Source Development Patterns and License Terms
  15. R Gibbons, 1992, Optimal Incentive Contracts in the Presence of Career Concerns, Journal of Political Economy, 100, 468, 10.1086/261826 · DOI
  16. R B Grady, 1999, An economic release decision model: Insights into software project management, Proceedings of Applications of Software Measurement 1999 Conference, 225
  17. I.-H Hann, 2003, An Empirical Analysis of Economic Returns to Open Source Participation
  18. J Hirschleifer, 1983, From weakest-link to best-shot: The voluntary provision of public goods, Public Choice, 41, 371, 10.1007/bf00141070 · DOI
  19. B Holmstr�m, 1982, Essays in Economics and Management in Honor of Lars Wohlbeckm, Swedish School of Economics, 13, 324
  20. H Itoh, 1991, Incentives to Help in Multi-Agent Situations, Econometrica, 59, 611, 10.2307/2938221 · DOI
  21. S Jeon, 1996, Moral Hazard and Reputational Concerns in Teams: Implications for Organizational Choice, International Journal of Industrial Organization, 14, 297, 10.1016/0167-7187(95)00482-3 · DOI
  22. J P Johnson, 1999, Open Source Software: Private Provision of a Public Good, Economics of Open Source Software, 11, 637, 10.1162/105864002320757280 · DOI
  23. P M Johnson, 1994, An Instrumented Approach to Improving Software Quality through Formal Technical Review, Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Software Engineering, 41, 49, 10.1109/icse.1994.296771 · DOI
  24. B Klein, 1978, Vertical integration, appropriable rents, and the competitive contracting process, Journal of Law and Economics, 21, 297, 10.1086/466922 · DOI
  25. J Kuan, 2001, Open Source Software as a Lead User's Make or Buy Decision
  26. O Laitenberger, 1999, Generalizing Perspective-base Inspection to Handle Object-Oriented Development Artifacts, Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Software Engineering, 494, 10.1145/302405.302680 · DOI
  27. K R Lakhani, 2003, Why Hackers do what they do: Understanding Motivation Effort in Free/Open Software Projects, 10.2139/ssrn.443040 · DOI · Paper page
  28. E P Lazear, 1989, Pay Equality and Industrial Politics, Journal of Political Economy, 97, 561, 10.1086/261616 · DOI
  29. E Lee, 1997, Software inspections: How to diagnose problems and improve the odds of organizational acceptance, Crosstalk: The Journal of Defensive Software Engineering, 10, 10
  30. S Lee, 2003, Open Source as a Signalling Device-An Economic Analysis
  31. J Lerner, 2002, Some Simple Economics of Open Source, Journal of Industrial Economics, 52, 197, 10.1111/1467-6451.00174 · DOI · Paper page
  32. M Meyers, 1997, Performance Comparisons and Dynamic Incentives, Journal of Political Economy, 105, 547, 10.1086/262082 · DOI
  33. P R Milgrom, 1988, Employment Contracts, Influence Activities, and Efficient Organizational Design, Journal of Political Economy, 96, 42, 10.1086/261523 · DOI
  34. A Mockus, 2000, A Case Study of Open Source Software Development: The Apache Server, Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Software Engineering, 263, 10.1145/337180.337209 · DOI
  35. D Mookherjee, 1984, Optimal Incentive Schemes with Many Agents, Review of Economic Studies, 51, 433, 10.2307/2297432 · DOI
  36. J Ortega, 2003, Power in the Firm and Managerial Career Concerns, Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, 12, 1, 10.1162/105864003321220715 · DOI
  37. E S Raymond, 1999, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, 10.5210/fm.v3i2.578 · DOI
  38. K M Schmidt, 2002, Public Subsidies for Open Source? Some Economic Policy Issues of the Software Market, 10.2139/ssrn.319081 · DOI · Paper page
  39. C Shapiro, 2003, Linux Adoption in the Public Sector: An Economic Analysis
  40. E Von Hippel, 2002, Open source projects as horizontal innovation networks-by and for users, MIT Sloan School of Management Working Paper, 4366, 10.2139/ssrn.328900 · DOI · Paper page
  41. K E Wiegers, 2002, Peer Reviews in Software
  42. O E Williamson, 1975, Markets and hierarchies: Analysis and antitrust implications, The economic institutions of capitalism
  43. X Xu, 2003, Development costs and open source software
  44. Y Yamauchi, 2000, Collaboration with Lean Media: How Open Source Software Succeeds, Proceedings of the 2000 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 329, 10.1145/358916.359004 · DOI

Cited by

See all 90

Metadata

Authors
Johnson, J.
Affiliations
Cornell University (US)
Corresponding author
Johnson, Justin
Venue
Information Economics and Policy
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2004
Volume
18
Issue
4
Pages
477-497
ISSN
0167-6245 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.2139/ssrn.535022
OpenAlex
W3123489069
Cited by
90
References
0
Citations by year
2025: 1 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 4 · 2021: 7 · 2020: 2 · 2019: 2 · 2018: 5 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 2 · 2014: 1 · 2013: 4 · 2012: 5
FWCI
14.84
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Information Economics and Policy (publishedVersion)
  • SSRN Electronic Journal (acceptedVersion)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Science Applications › Open Source Software Innovations
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Strategy and Management › Digital Platforms and Economics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
Keywords
open source software, peer review, software maintainability, transaction costs, proprietary software, open source communities

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Collaboration, Peer Review and Open Source Software. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2139/ssrn.535022
The paper
Johnson, J. (2004). Collaboration, Peer Review and Open Source Software. Information Economics and Policy. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.535022

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.