Digital dark matter and the economic contribution of Apache

Managed Ecosystems and Translucent Institutional Logics: Engaging Communities

“…Social media platforms are generally "free" to users, but users "pay" by providing their private data that the platform then leverages to target advertising. As a result of these non-pecuniary benefits and incentives, it is often difficult to measure the economic value of the ecosystem (Greenstein and Nagle, 2014) as well as the level of effort it took to create it, which creates an interesting dilemma both for the study of managed ecosystems and their own internal valuation analyses.…”

Do‐it‐yourself Digital: the Production Boundary, the Productivity Puzzle and Economic Welfare

“…However, the scale seems likely to be large. Greenstein and Nagle (2014) estimate that the use of just one product, Apache, in the USA equates in value to between 1.3% and 8.7% of the stock of private investment in pre-packaged software. There is ample anecdotal evidence of, for instance, the rapidly growing use of open source software, including by large companies such as Walmart and Netflix.…”

“…If household digital production were to be placed inside the production boundary, like household production of goods, then the market value of the use of these digital products would need to be estimated. As all have near-market substitutes, one approach would be to apply, for example, the price of a similar proprietary software package to an open source product, and to an estimated quantity of downloads of the software, although there might of course be immense practical difficulties, not least geo-locating the input activity and the uses or downloads (Nordhaus 2004;Greenstein and Nagle 2014).…”

Motivating the Established, Deterring the NewwThe Divergent Effect of Platform Competition on Member Contributions in Digital Mapping Communities

“…However, it sheds no light on the reverse question of how competition affects community-based platforms. Examining this reverse effect is important since knowledge-producing communities are radically different from commercially-driven platforms (since they have no formal contracts and largely volunteer contributors) and play an increasingly important role in terms of their contribution to the economy (Greenstein and Nagle, 2014). A formal model by Athey and Ellison (2014) examines the effect of competition on knowledgeproducing communities, illustrating how different assumptions about the response of members affects competition between commercial and community-based platforms.…”

“…While the stellar success of community-based platforms (e.g., OpenStreetMap, Linux, Wikipedia) illustrates their vast potential (Greenstein and Nagle, 2014;Jeppesen and Lakhani, 2010;Nagle, 2017), we have seen remarkable perseverance by commercial alternatives (Economist, 2016). Scholars, managers, and policy makers alike are interested in understanding the long-term evolution of industries (Agarwal and Gort, 1996).…”