A New Type Of Property Rights Institution And Production Mode In Knowledge Economy

The success of open source software (OSS) is an astonishing phenomenon. It reflects that some changes on the economic rules, form and institution are occurring induced by the information technology revolution. Aiming at the OSS and focusing on the knowledge industry, we try to disclose what have been changed in the New Economy.In this paper we study the OSS phenomena from three dimensions.Firstly, we research on the property rights institution of OSS. After analyzing the terms of OSS license, we testify the OSS adopts common property rights institution and is a kind of pure public goods. After studying the necessary condition for the appearance of OSS's common property rights institution, we focus our research on why the public goods can be provided. We find there are two main kinds of groups and their incentive mechanism to provide the public goods, Elite Group's Selective Incentive and Study Group's Study Incentive. Then we build models to analyze the two groups'internal process, the factors affecting incentive intensity and the change of the two kinds of mechanism. At last we apply the study result to explore why a great amount free knowledge public goods has been provided in the Internet world.Secondly, we research on the organization form and production mode of OSS. We find that the organization form of OSS is a new type that is different from the organization form of enterprise, market and ordinary virtual organization. A new kind mode of production is adopted in this organization. We name the organization of OSS as Self-organized and Distributed Organization (SDO). After comparing with the traditional enterprise and market organizations, we find that SDO is superior in innovation capability, transaction costs, resource allocation efficiency, organizational flexibility and adaptability to the two other. So the SDO is an advanced kind of organization that accommodates to the environment of IT revolution.Lastly, we research on the competing state between the two kinds of institutions, that is, the SDO in common property rights and the traditional enterprise in private property rights. By analyzing the characterizes of the software industry and market, we build an asymmetric duopoly model with production differentiation and network externality to study the competitive equilibrium state and it's shift. The model shows that the appearance of SDO increasing the social welfare and weaken the monopolistic capability of incumbent in the market. The model also shows that the appearance of SDO can't take place the traditional enterprise in short term and two kinds of institution will coexist for a long time.