Incentives to copyleft – Jena conference

I have been at a very good conference in Jena in experiments and innovation economics, organised by Marco Guerzoni (here).

I have presented my experimental paper on the Bessen-Maskin argument against patents and copyrights in software development. I have used a new design that implies creation of words, as in Scrabble.

In my design, players create word and can extended them (adding only one letter at a time in any position); they decide whether to impose copyright royalties or not on their creations. If you are interested, the paper is temporarily here, and will soon be released as a working paper of the Department of Economics of the University of Milan.

To implement the design I have written a software in Python (using wxpython and enchant). The source is here, released under the GPL.

Update: innovate sequentially!

I have been busy working on the last paper of my PhD dissertation lately.

It is an experiment in the field of economics of innovation, and addresses one of the possible explanations to what incentives motivate innovators to forego copyright gains and use a copyleft – free licence instead.

The paper is based on theoretical work from Nobel prize Eric Maskin jointly with James Bessen (link to the paper about software patents, sequential innovation and copyright, here) and on the interesting literature on the ‘Anticommons’ problem by Heller (interestingly, Heller has a background in transition economics as I have: look here for basic info, original article about law and Moscow shops here) and Buchanan and Yoon (link here).

I created a custom experimental software for it, in python, using a couple of easy but powerful libraries: wxpython for the GUI and enchant for spellchecking – yes, it is a word game, and I need spellchecking extensively. Python is very easy to learn, flexible and powerful. It cost me a month of work to set up the experimental software, but it was my first, and if I ever need to set up a custom software and not use z-tree again, I will have to spend no more than a couple of weeks to have a perfectly fine-tuned software. I would not recommend using python for running experiments to a software newbie, but if you are only slightly software-literate (or plain beginners, as I am) it could be considered as one of the choices.

Compulsory screenshot follows…

wxpython in action!

After running the experiments I’ll be presenting in a very interesting conference in Jena on experimental methods within the economics of innovation (here). And then I will hopefully be graduating. And then, who knows…

Working Paper 14-2009

My latest paper on the development of Open Source software has been published as a DEAS Working Paper at the Department of Economics of the University of Milan.

It deals with the inner workings of the community of Open Source software developers, using experimental and agent-based methodologies. Its main result is that FOSS communities harness risk-taking attitudes by memebers, and are able to turn them into collective gains.

The paper can be found:

• on the department working paper page
• on IDEAS

Moreover, the paper has been presented at the very interesting Padova FLOSS Workshop, and let me thank the participants for a wonderful two day experience and for valuable comments!

Welcome

Here is my blog. I’ll keep adding things as they come along. They will be mainly in english, with some Italian here and there.

Take a deep breath.