Immigrant Assimilation, Trust and Social Capital

Trust is a crucial component of social capital. We use an experimental moonlighting game with a representative sample of the U.S. population, oversampling immigrants, to study trust, positive, and negative reciprocity between first-generation immigrants and native-born Americans as a measure of immigrant assimilation. We also survey subjects in order to relate trusting and trustworthy behavior with demographic characteristics and traditional, survey-based measures of social capital. We find that immigrants are as trusting as native-born U.S. citizens when faced with another native-born citizen, but do not trust other immigrants. Immigrants appear to be less trustworthy overall but this finding disappears when we control for demographic variables and the amount sent by the first mover. The length of time an immigrant has been a naturalized U.S. citizen appears to increase trustworthiness but does not affect trusting behavior. Women and older people are less likely to trust, but no more or less trustworthy.moonlighting game, trust, reciprocity, immigration, experiment

Trust and Trustworthiness of Immigrants and Native-Born Americans

Trust and trustworthiness are crucial to amelioration of social dilemmas. Distrust and malevolence aggravate social dilemmas. We use an experimental moonlighting game with a sample of the U.S. population, oversampling immigrants, to observe interactions between immigrants and native-born Americans in a social dilemma situation that can elicit both benevolent and malevolent actions. We survey participants in order to relate outcomes in the moonlighting game to demographic characteristics and traditional, survey-based measures of trust and trustworthiness and show that they are strongly correlated. Overall, we find that immigrants are as trusting as native-born U.S. citizens when they interact with native-born citizens but do not trust other immigrants. Immigrants appear to be less trustworthy overall but this finding disappears when we control for demographic variables. Women and older people are less likely to trust but no more or less trustworthy. Highly religious immigrants are less trusting and less trustworthy than both other immigrants and native-born Americans

Essays on the Economics of Open-Source Software

This dissertation comprises three essays analyzing various economic questions relating to open-source software development. The common thread linking these essays is the long-term sustainability of the open-source software development model, which is largely built on unpaid contributions from individual developers scattered across the world. The first essay develops a theoretical analysis of the market for operating systems as two-sided platforms, modeling the effects of competition and compatibility between a proprietary platform developed by a profit-maximizing firm, and an open platform (a public good developed by volunteers). Looking at the impacts on the proprietary platform firm, and application developer firms and users of both platforms, I find that under certain circumstances, a proprietary platform can find it profitable to become compatible with the open platform. However, it is always optimal in terms of social welfare to have compatibility between platforms. The second essay uses a laboratory experiment to examine how these characteristics and levels of motivations that are heterogeneous across individuals interact to result in sustainable, non-zero levels of contribution to open source software. There is a pronounced “leadership effect,” with subjects playing in the first position invariably contributing more frequently than those in the second position, and so on. Heterogeneity preserves the leadership effect, but increases contributions across the board, and eliminates the pattern of declining individual and total group contributions over time frequently observed in public goods experiments. The third essay studies the micro-foundations of open-source software contributions and provides an empirical examination of developer motivations using survey data. If open-source contributions and education are both signals of ability, then their impact on income is likely to be linked. They may be complements if open source contributions reinforce the signal from education by showing that one stands out from the crowd, or they might be substitutes if open-source development replaces expensive education in honing programming skills by offering more immediate feedback. Using an instrumental variables framework to deal with the endogeneity of the education and contribution choices, I find that leading an open-source project and completing college are complementary practices, so that the signaling and reputation-building aspect dominates

Giving It Away for Free? The Nature of Job-Market Signaling by Open-Source Software Developers

Much work has been done in recent times to answer the question of why people contribute, and continue to contribute to open-source and free software, despite the lack of immediate financial gain in most cases. Lerner and Tirole (2002) hypothesize that open-source contributions act as a form of job-market signaling they permit prospective employers to judge a person's ability directly. This paper tests the nature of this signaling using a complementarity framework. Do developers use open source software as a way to enhance the signal from a college education, or to substitute for it, in a form of learning by doing? I find evidence that they are complements, while conclusively rejecting the idea that they are substitutes.