• Medientyp: E-Artikel
  • Titel: Open Source Software and Firm Productivity
  • Beteiligte: Nagle, Frank
  • Erschienen: Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), 2019
  • Erschienen in: Management Science, 65 (2019) 3, Seite 1191-1215
  • Sprache: Englisch
  • DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2017.2977
  • ISSN: 0025-1909; 1526-5501
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  • Beschreibung: As open source software (OSS) is increasingly used as a key input by firms, understanding its impact on productivity becomes critical. This study measures the firm-level productivity impact of nonpecuniary (free) OSS and finds a positive and significant value-added return for firms that have an ecosystem of complementary capabilities. There is no such impact for firms without this ecosystem of complements. Dynamic panel analysis, instrumental variables, and a variety of robustness checks are used to address measurement error concerns and to add support for a more causal interpretation of the results. For firms with an ecosystem of complements, a 1% increase in the use of nonpecuniary OSS leads to an increase in value-added productivity of between 0.002% and 0.008%. This effect is smaller for larger firms, and the results indicate that prior research underestimates the amount of IT firms use.The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2977 .This paper was accepted by Chris Forman, information systems.