The Research Program on the "Economics of Knowledge Contribution and Distribution" has a post-doctoral fellowship position available for 2013-14. Candidates should have a recently completed PhD and have a research proposal related to the following areas. The impact of open scientific publication on research outcomes and dissemination. The motivations and constraints on the sharing of … Continue reading Post-Doctoral Position
Category: User Contributions
Who owns Wikipedia?
Wikipedia has as one of its defining characteristics, its openness. Anyone can edit it. Anyone can reverse someone else's edits. And that process has led to the encyclopaedic resource we have today. How Wikipedia works is still a bit of a mystery. But what appears to be the case is that a core group of volunteers … Continue reading Who owns Wikipedia?
Health Information Wants to be Shared
Information Wants to be Shared focusses on business models for information content provision. But the principles behind it, that information is more valuable if it is exchanged freely, obviously extend to many other matters. One such matter is health-related information. John Wilbanks is a crusader that has taken the issue of health sharing on. As is often … Continue reading Health Information Wants to be Shared
Interesting interview with Tim O’Reilly
This is just a pointer to an interesting interview with Tim O'Reilly conducted by Edge. It related to the Clothesline Paradox previously discussedby Shane Greenstein. Just a taste: But what's really interesting, when I dug into YouTube, is that it turns out that the monetary economy there is about to explode. It is exploding. It's going to be one … Continue reading Interesting interview with Tim O’Reilly
PopVox — Building a civic profile online
Last week I was teaching “IDEA week” to my mid-career Sloan Fellow executive students. IDEA (innovation-driven entrepreneurial advantage;-)) is a week when we usually explore how innovation provides entrepreneurs with the advantage they need to really build a business that has competitive advantage and can compete with large established firms – either in new markets or … Continue reading PopVox — Building a civic profile online
Snapguide and the content platform
A little while ago I wrote about the importance of content platforms: “Content platforms” are emerging that are designed to solve precisely this problem. A content platform is a standardized means of presenting information. Take, for instance, Yelp. If you want restaurant information, it gives you a list of possibilities with a ranking that can be sorted … Continue reading Snapguide and the content platform
Reviewer wars and how to fix them
Matt Yglesias has a new book out, The Rent is Too Damn High. I worked on housing policy back in Australia and so have bought the book but haven’t had a chance to read it. What is interesting me are the Amazon reviews of the book. I took a screenshot. You can see that it is completely polarised. … Continue reading Reviewer wars and how to fix them
iHonesty
Can an iPhone app keep businesses honest? Apparently so when it comes to the accuracy of self reported information about skiing conditions. That is the finding from a new paper by Jonathan Zinman and Eric Zitzewitz. Here is the abstract: Casual empiricism suggests that deceptive advertising about product quality is prevalent, and several classes of theories explore its causes … Continue reading iHonesty
Sharing and ad revenue
Felix Salmon looks at new platforms that make sharing easy — specifically, Tumblr and Pinterest. Reblogging, on Tumblr, is so easy that the vast majority of Tumblr sites actually create little or no original content: they just republish content from other people. That’s a wonderful thing, for two reasons. Firstly, it takes people who are shy about (or just … Continue reading Sharing and ad revenue
Novices make Wikipedia tick
Wikipedia’s success and even existence is a mystery. Social scientists (not just economists) do not understand how it could be that a completely open access encyclopedia could have worked. The traditional theory was that contributors who invested to make Wikipedia good would be subject to free riding and that any rewards they received would be … Continue reading Novices make Wikipedia tick
Contribution Economy 