Motives and perception of fairness in commercial user communities

Abstract

Rather recently, the widely discussed example of software development in open source projects has intensified research in the economic field of public goods. Lerner and Tirole (2002, p.198) bring forward a puzzle that an increasing body of literature aims to understand and explain: "Why should top-notch programmers contribute freely to the provision of a public good?". Scholars argue theoretically1 and provide empirical evidence2 that innovators derive various and additional benefits from their innovative activity than the primarily monetary ones postulated in traditional economic theory. Indeed, studies, also covering other industries than software, find that user communities emerge, which exhibit a mix of benefits such as reputation effects and reciprocity among contributing users. In the context of this article, user communities are understood to be innovation communities, meaning "nodes consisting of individuals or firms interconnected by information transfer links which may involve face-to-face, electronic, or other communication" (von Hippel 2005, p.96).3 The benefits inherent in such communities are generally argued to provide the answer to the economic puzzle stated. A current phenomenon in practice has found considerably less attention in literature so far but might upset the incentive system found to work for innovative communities. Commercial firms increasingly develop business models in order to capitalize systematically on innovative activity of user communities. In early 2005, for example, the technology firm Sun Mircosystems Inc. released the source code of its commercial operating system Solaris to the programming community (Shankland 2005a). By doing so, the firm attempts to tap on an enormous development pool that user communities provide and aims at substituting internal development effort. Similar business models exist and become especially interesting if they change the notion of open access to property that prevails in open source communities (Weber 2004). If firms take openly accessible innovations from a user community and put them in their private domain, it may disrupt the community's stable incentive system. Specifically, if benefits of the innovative activity in the community are perceived to be distributed unfairly between the contributors and the commercial firm, users may turn away. Fairness in this context is defined in reference to economics literature which considers "fair" agents to be averse against cooperation settings with inequitable benefit distribution (Fehr and Schmidt 1999). The survey described in this article aims at contributing to a first understanding of both aspects brought forward in this introduction. Both the motives and the perception of fairness of contributors to a user community with an adjunct commercial firm shall be studied. It shall be examined to what extent members of this community are similarly motivated as contributors to open source projects and whether they find benefits to be distributed fairly. The article proceeds as follows. In a first step, a literature review summarizes findings of empirical studies on open source communities. It follows a section with a case study of StataCorp, the vendor of a statistical software package, and its user community. The section also contains an explanation of the method used to examine the user community in more detail as well as descriptive results and discussion of the participants' motives and perception of fairness. The article ends with a conclusion and outlook for further research areas. © 2006 Springer Berlin · Heidelberg.