Interesting presentation from Jerome Hergueux down the street at the Berkman Center. He studies peer production — “a way of producing goods and services that relies on self-organizing communities of individuals who come together to produce a shared outcome” — through the lens of Wikipedia.

From Wikipedia to Open Source Software, Peer Production — a large-scale collaborative model of production primarily based on voluntary contributions — is emerging as an economically significant production model alongside firms, markets and governments. Yet, its impressive success remains difficult to explain through the assumptions of standard economic theory. In this talk, Jerome Hergueux — Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Sciences Po (Department of Economics) and the University of Strasbourg (Institute of Political Studies) and Berkman Fellow — reflects on the prosocial foundations of cooperation in this new Peer Production economy, taking Wikipedia as one paradigmatic example, and asks: how can we start to build a workable theory of individuals’ motivations to freely contribute time and efforts for the provision of global public goods?