Seminar  |  07/06/2016 | 12:00 PM  –  01:30 PM

Brown Bag Seminar: Social Motives and the Success of Organizations - Evidence from Open Source Software

Emeric Henry (Sciences Po)

Abstract
Using a large scale experiment involving more than a thousand open source software programmers, we match individual monthly contributions to open source programs with behavior in online games we ran. We study how social preferences affect the patterns of production and the overall success of projects. We show in particular that groups with a larger share of reciprocators are more likely to fail, but conditional on not failing, are more successful. The effect is particularly strong for technological areas and development stages characterized by more variance in contributions.