Author: Ryan Safner
Abstract: Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, stands as a highly visible success story of an organization that provides a public good, when formal theory implies it should not exist. The modern literature on intellectual property rights places the emphasis on extending the logic of property rights to intangibles, and focuses on a static tradeoff between providing incentives to overcome the free rider problem of providing a public good, and providing too much monopoly power.
Rather, I argue, following Ostrom (1990) and Hess and Ostrom (2006), that we should shift our analysis to exploring the institutional backdrop that makes property rights successful or unsuccessful, and view knowledge as a commons to be managed properly. I extend and apply the Ostrom’s institutional design principles and explores the robustness of rules that emerge entrepreneurially to govern a commons, and use Wikipedia as a case study of success.
Full Paper on SSRN: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2564230
Photo from ryansafner.com. CC-BY.
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