Paul A. David - US grants

Research on theoretical, empirical and public policy issues of technological standards in computing and communications is producing a growing body of important literature, a part of which deals with understanding the process of standardization and the impact of standards on technological progress and economic efficiency. This workshop seeks: to assess the contributions of recent research in this area, from presentations of papers by representative leading researchers in economics and related disciplines; to facilitate and clarify examination of these issues by developing some basic conceptual and terminological guideposts for this young research area; and to identify the most promising theoretical and empirical research questions relevant to the policy issues surrounding standardization. The workshop will be limited to about 24 participants and will be held in mid-June, 1988 at Stanford University. The eleven papers presented at the workshop will be reproduced as part of Stanford University's Center for Economic Policy Research's Discussion and Technical Paper Series.

This project provides theoretical and econometric methods for analyzing how advanced information technologies, and the structures of the organizations using them, affect the performance of modern, complex, industrial production facilities. The research focusses upon the productivity and reliability of established production facilities, and its ultimate aim is to assess the impacts of new technologies for process monitoring and control upon these two quantitative dimensions of performance. The research agenda has three elements. First, it aims to advance the analysis of production systems by examining the choices of techniques for process control and organizational design that would promote improvement sin reliability and productivity via more extensive uses of sophisticated information technology. Second, it proposes novel formulations of production theory that relate more directly to empirical observations of micro level production events. Third, the project undertakes to test the usefulness of its conceptual and methodological researches by applying these concretely, in a study of organizational and information-technology impacts on the performance of an economically important and exceptionally well-documented industry--commercial nuclear power plants operated by U.S. electric utility companies.

This award is for NSF co-sponsorship of an international workshop with the European Science Foundation (ESF) and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). The workshop will be held December 3-5, 1999 in Laxenburg, Austria. The objectives of the workshop are threefold: First, it will identify the main critical issues within this broad area and delineate the interrelationships among them; second, it will take stock of the present state of knowledge and of ongoing research concerning collaboration technologies and factors affecting their deployment and use; and third, it will provide a forum for discussion about further research on the co-evolution of technological, institutional and organizational infrastructures affecting the conduct of collaborative science on a global scale. Three substantive themes will be addressed: 1) how to characterize the technological opportunities encapsulated by the concept of a virtual laboratory; 2) the practical issues involved in organizing and conducting scientific work at a distance; and 3) the interaction between intellectual property issues and access to virtual libraries and data archives. NSF sponsorship will enable the participation of non-European experts in this workshop by funding US and Russia participants' travel to Europe. It will also enable the workshop organizers to commission revised and expanded papers for a post-workshop publication.

Open source software relies on the expertise of developers around the world, who volunteer to produce software collaboratively. Their mode of collaboration requires participants to share the results of their work freely with others. By revealing the source code of the programs on which they work, developers participating in these collaborations are able to design new features, fix bugs in programs, and tailor the software to suit their own needs. The attractiveness of engaging in this method of producing software in the Internet environment has led to the emergence and growth of specialized, online virtual communities whose members follow rather clearly established procedures in performing their professional tasks, but are otherwise bound together by loose rules of association. This project inquires into the sustainability of such organizations, and the likely extent of their domain of viability-in terms of the kinds of goods and services that might reliably be supplied in this way. The investigation has three more proximate empirical objectives. The first is to identify typical patterns in the evolution of these communities' informal organizational structures and their norms of conduct. The development of procedural authority, and other means of resolving conflicts among individuals in regard to the substance of their work, and of verifying and validating their contributions, are subjects for special study. The second objective is to characterize the distribution of effort input within these communities and its relationship to the structure and distribution of internal "rewards," and derived external benefits for different levels of participation. These tasks will be approached through analysis of passively collected data, participant responses to email survey questionnaires, and in-depth case histories of particular communities. A third and larger goal is to understand the dynamics of these "virtual communities" and the similarities and differences they exhibit in comparisons with collaborative organizations involving spatially distributed academic ("open science") researchers whose work is enabled by computer-mediated telecommunications

The free and open source software (F/OSS) mode of production is a new paradigm in the division of innovative labor. It may have transformative economic impacts not only in the sphere of software system products, but eventually find important applications over a much broader range of information-goods and -services. To investigate those potentialities requires that we first understand "the open source way of working:" How do F/OSS projects mobilize resources, allocate expertise, and retain the commitment of developers who contribute their work largely without direct compensation? How do different classes of projects vary in terms of their relative productivity performances, and how does F/OSS productivity compare with that of conventional commercial software firms? How fully are the products of these self-organized efforts able meet the long-term needs of other software users, rather than simply providing satisfactions of various kinds (including custom-built, reliable code) for the developers themselves? This multi-team research project is pursuing answers to these basic economic questions in an integrated research program that analyzes micro-level survey information on F/OSS developers, authorship distributions and code-structure data extracted by computer-automated methods from the source code itself, and agent-based stochastic simulation modeling of the dynamics of resource allocation within and among projects.