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Title: The Confederacy of Software Production: Field Experimental Evidence on Heterogeneous Developers, Tastes for Institutions and Effort
Citation Type: Conference Paper
Publication Year: 2010
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Abstract: At least as much as other innovative and creative problem-solving sectors of the economy, software development takes place in an extraordinary range of different sorts of organizations thus forming a patchwork or "confederacy" of institutional forms. We suggest one explanation that may begin to account for this heterogeneity: workers have different intrinsic tastes or preferences for different institutional regimes. We present field experimental evidence to show that software workers who are sorted into either a cooperative or competitive regime, depending on their tastes, exerted on the order of double the effort than those in a group of randomly-assigned workers (controlling for their skills). These results suggest that sorting on the basis of institutional tastes and preferences to different types of organizations may have large efficiency implications. Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Eric Lonstein for his assistance throughout this research project. We are grateful to
Url: https://conference.nber.org/conferences/2010/RDIA10/lakhani.pdf
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Authors: Boudreau London, Kevin J; Lakhani Harvard, Karim R; Davis, Jeff; Richard, Elizabeth; Fogarty, Jennifer; Reyna, Bara
Conference Name: NBER 50th Anniversary Conference on the Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity
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