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Jerome Hergueux on Cooperation in a Peer Production Economy: Experimental Evidence from Wikipedia

December 4th, 2013

From Wikipedia to Open Source Software, Peer Production –- a large-scale collaborative model of production primarily based on voluntary contributions –- is emerging as an economically significant production model alongside firms, markets and governments. Yet, its impressive success remains difficult to explain through the assumptions of standard economic theory.

In this talk, Jerome Hergueux — Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Sciences Po (Department of Economics) and the University of Strasbourg (Institute of Political Studies) and Berkman Fellow — reflects on the prosocial foundations of cooperation in this new Peer Production economy, taking Wikipedia as one paradigmatic example, and asks: how can we start to build a workable theory of individuals’ motivations to freely contribute time and efforts for the provision of global public goods?


Also in ogg for download

More info on this event here.

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1 Comment Add your own

  • 1. Jonah Mise  |  December 6th, 2013 at 12:44 am

    This sounds incredibly interesting…and I’ll definitely be downloading and listening to this.

    I remember reading a study a while back that looked at public-run, peer-reviewed websites like Wikipedia and WebMD and the conclusion was that they were some of the most accurate websites online.

    We definitely need more of these.

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