TRANSACTION COSTS, FADS, AND POLITICALLY MOTIVATED MISDIRECTION IN AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH

This paper examines efficiency implications of national and local policies for fund allocation and management of agricultural research, which produce pure and impure public goods. The possibility is examined that competitive grants programs increase rent seeking activities by scientists relative to specific block grants or formula allocations and thereby reduce both the real resources available to produce traditional research outputs and the productivity with which research resources are used. Management of local research units, including advantages of incentive compatible contracts, is also considered. Additional conceptual and empirical work are needed before the issues are resolved.

Incentive-Centered Design for User-Contributed Content

We review incentive-centered design for user-contributed content (UCC) on the Internet. UCC systems, produced (in part) through voluntary contributions made by non-employees, face fundamental incentives problems. In particular, to succeed, users need to be motivated to contribute in the first place ("getting stuff in"). Further, given heterogeneity in content quality and variety, the degree of success will depend on incentives to contribute a desirable mix of quality and variety ("getting \emph{good} stuff in"). Third, because UCC systems generally function as open-access publishing platforms, there is a need to prevent or reduce the amount of negative value (polluting or manipulating) content. The work to date on incentives problems facing UCC is limited and uneven in coverage. Much of the empirical research concerns specific settings and does not provide readily generalizable results. And, although there are well-developed theoretical literatures on, for example, the private provision of public goods (the "getting stuff in" problem), this literature is only applicable to UCC in a limited way because it focuses on contributions of (homogeneous) money, and thus does not address the many problems associated with heterogeneous information content contributions (the "getting \emph{good} stuff in" problem). We believe that our review of the literature has identified more open questions for research than it has pointed to known results.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/100229/1/icd4ucc.pdf7

A circular commons for digital devices: tools and services in ereuse.org

Circular economies are particularly relevant in the context of digital devices or electric and electronic equipment (EEE). Many digital devices built using scarce and potentially toxic materials have a too-short life, instead of being repaired or reused. In addition, informal recycling of electronics in the developed and developing world has emerged as a new global environmental concern. We describe the dimensions of the problem, the challenge to move to a circular economy, and the ecology for digital devices as well as how this depends on the traceability of devices and cooperation among all stakeholders locally and globally. Moreover we examine the need for support mechanisms to facilitate, standardise, and reduce the transaction cost of the processes and increase their added value. We present eReuse.org, a set of open-source tools, procedures, open data, and services organised as a common-pool resource (CPR) to reach the circular economy of electronics through promoting reuse and ensuring traceability until recycling. Further, eReuse.org envisions empowering and engaging people around the world to create local communities that bootstrap electronic reuse and to support the development of a globally recognised reuse quality and traceability standard.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Dynamics of Interbacterial Cooperation and Cheating

"Bacterial communities face multiple environmental constraints in their environments. One of the most prevalent ways that bacteria overcome these constraints is the production of public goods. By definition, public goods are compounds that generate benefit for the entire population, producer and other individuals alike. Non-producers of public goods can avoid the cost of production of the public goods but can still benefit from them. When mixed with producers, the energy that non-producers save from not producing the public goods allows them to grow at higher rates than the producers. This can cause the non-producer of the public goods to behave as cheaters, increase in frequency in the overall population and eventually diminish the cooperation and thus the production of the public goods. The lack of public goods production can lead to the drastic reduction of the carrying capacity of the overall population. This phenomenon is defined as the tragedy of the commons in evolutionary biology.(...)"FCG: 1/BD/1