What is Your Software Worth?

This article presents a method for valuing software based on the income that use of that software is expected to generate in the future. Well-known principles of intellectual property (IP) valuation, sales expectations, discounting to present value, and the like, are applied, always focusing on the benefits and costs of software. A major issue, not dealt with in the literature of valuing intangibles, is that software is continually upgraded. Applying depreciation schedules is the simple solution, but does not represent at all the actual devaluation of the inherent IP of software. A realistic approach, allowing ongoing maintenance, is presented here. All steps of the process are presented and then integrated via a simple quantitative example. Having a quantitative model on a spreadsheet allows exploration of business alternatives. An example a service model is evaluated. Conclusions are drawn that reflect on academic and business practice.Valuation, intellectual property, software, software life, maintenance

Government Spending Composition in a Simple Model of Schumpeterian Growth

This paper investigates the relevance of government purchasing behavior for innovation-based economic growth. We construct a parsimonious Schumpeterian growth model in which demand from the public sphere can effectively alter the economy's rate of technological change. We incorporate results of various empirical studies arguing that public sector demand acts as incentive for private innovation activities. In contrast to the standard Schumpeterian growth framework, we account for industry heterogeneity in terms of innovation potential. This extension allows to bring government demand policy within the realm of the growth policy debate. By varying the composition of its purchases, the government can induce a reallocation of private resources to stimulate the rate of technological change. This comes along with temporarily faster economic growth. Moreover, our welfare analysis implies that it is always worth implementing a policy in which industries benefit from public purchases subject to their specific innovation size.public demand, endogenous technological change, Schumpeterian growth

Follow the Intellectual Property, How does Industry pay Programmers' Salaries when they move the related IP rights to offshore taxhavens?"

In the ongoing discussion about offshoring in the computer and data-processing industries, the 2006 ACM report Globalization and Offshoring of Software addressed job shifts due to globalization in the software industry. But jobs represent only half of the labor and capital equation in business. In today’s high-technology industries, intellectual property (IP) supplies the other half, the capital complement. Offshoring IP always accompanies offshoring jobs and, while less visible, may be a major driver of job transfer. The underlying economic model—involving ownership of profits, taxation, and compensation of workers from the revenue their products generate—has not been explicated and is largely unknown in the computer science community. This article presents the issue of software income allocation and the role IP plays in offshoring. It also tries to explain why computer experts lack insight into the economics of software, from investments made, to profits accumulated, to capital becoming available for investment in new projects and jobs.Offshoring, offshore outsourcing, tax havens, job loss, intellectual property, tax avoidance, non-routine profits

The Impact of Government Procurement Composition on Private R&D Activities

This paper addresses the question of whether government procurement can work as a de facto innovation policy tool. We develop an endogenous growth model with quality-improving innovation that incorporates industries with heterogeneous innovation sizes. Government demand in high-tech industries increases the market size in these industries and, with it, the incentives for private firms to invest in R&D. At the economy-wide level, the additional R&D induced in high-tech industries outweighs the R&D foregone in all remaining industries. The implications of the model are empirically tested using a unique data set that includes federal procurement in U.S. states. We find evidence that a shift in the composition of government purchases toward high-tech industries indeed stimulates privately funded company R&D.public demand, technological change, endogenous growth

Costs of Control in Groups

This paper explores the role of social groups in explaining the reaction to control.We propose a simple model with a principal using control devices and a controlledagent, which incorporates the existence of social groups. Testing experimentally theconjectures derived from the model and related literature, we find that agents in socialgroups (i) perform more than other (no-group) agents; (ii) expect less control thanno-group agents; (iii) decrease their performance substantially when actual controlexceeds their expectation, while no-group agents do not react; (iv) do not reciprocatewhen facing less control than expected, while no-group agents do.

Technology, outsourcing, and the demand for heterogeneous labor: Exploring the industry dimension

It has become common within the literature of skill-biased technological change to look at technologies, as well as their impact on the demand for labor as homogeneous across industries. This paper challenges this view. Using a linked employer-employee panel of Germany differentiated by industries for the period 2001-2005, we investigate substitution effects between labor of different skills (tasks) on the one hand, and technology as well as outsourcing on the other. Our findings are at odds with the idea of economy-wide homogeneity of substitution patterns. We find that in some industries IT capital substitutes for labor, while it complements it in others. However, substitution patterns are symmetric across labor types. Outsourcing often correlates negatively with the demand for labor performing explicit and problem-solving tasks. It is mainly uncorrelated or positively correlated with the demand for labor performing interactive tasks. The outsourcing-related results support the offshoring theory proposed by Blinder (2006).demand for skills, technology, outsourcing

On Social Identity, Subjective Expectations, and the Costs of Control

Controlling employees can have severe consequences in situations that are not fully contractible. However, the perception of control may be contingent on the nature of the relationship between principal and agent. We, therefore, propose a principal-agent model of control that takes into account social identity (in the sense of Akerlof and Kranton, 2000, 2005). From the model and previous literature, we conclude that a shared social identity between the principal and agent has both a cognitive, that is, belief-related, and a behavioral, that is, performance-related, dimension. We test these theoretical conjectures in a labor market experiment with perfect monitoring. Our ndings confirm that social identity has important implications for the agent's decision-making. First, agents who are socially close to the principal (in-group) perform, on average, more on behalf of the principal than socially distant (no-group) agents. Second, social identity shapes the agent's subjective expectations of the acceptable level of control. In-group agents expect to experience less control than no-group agents. Third, an agent's reaction to the monitoring level she eventually faces also depends on social identity. If the experienced level of control is lower than the expected control level, that is, the agent faces a positive sensation, the increase in performance is less pronounced for in-group agents than for no-group agents. In the case of a negative sensation, however, in-group agents react stronger than no-group agents. Put differently, being socially distant from the principal amplies the performance-enhancing effect of a positive control surprise and mitigates the detrimental performance effect of a negative surprise.Control, Identity, Employee motivation, Principal-agent theory, Lab experiment

Disposal of hypergolic propellants. phase 6, task 3: Prototype disposal pond

The design and operation of a prototype diposal of hypergolic propellants waste are described. Experiments with water hyacinths were performed

Disposal of hypergolic propellants, phase 6 task 4. Disposal pond products

Waste monomethyl hydrazine scrubber liquor, consisting of aqueous solutions containing small amounts of CH4, Cl2, CH3Cl, CH2Cl2, and CHCl3 as well as large amounts of CH3OH is scheduled to be dumped in stabilization ponds along with nitrate and nitrite salt solutions obtained as waste liquors from the N2O4 scrubbers. The wastes are investigated as to the hazardous materials generated by such combinations of items as described as well as the finite lifetime of such materials in the stabilization ponds. The gas liquid chromatograph was used in the investigation. A series of experiments designed to convert nitrate and nitrite salts to the environmentally innocuous N2O and N2 using solar energy is reported. Results indicate that this solar conversion is feasible

The cross in the thought of Jesus according to the synoptic records

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University, 1936. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive