Online cooperation and peer production.

Summary From open source software to Wikipedia, peer production mobilizes hundreds of thousands of contributors around the world. It is an important source of value creation in the highly competitive information and technology sectors, and a major source of innovation. Even beyond its economic importance, the emergence of peer production represents an opportunity to shed new light on a number of long-standing and particularly difficult questions in the literature. Given the often unconventional nature of work incentives in peer production environments, they are particularly well suited to study the impact of non-standard economic preferences on the production of public goods, to analyze their role as work incentives, and to assess their consequences in terms of organizational economics.This dissertation work relies on an original online experimentation tool (developed and evaluated in Chapter 1) to combine large-scale online experiments and computational methods (i.This work relies on a novel online experimentation tool (developed and evaluated in Chapter 1) to combine large-scale online experiments and computational methods (i. e. systematic data mining of subjects' field behavior) in order to (i) conduct the first-ever comprehensive field test of the theory of private production of public goods, (ii) study the importance of social preferences as work motivations in real productive organizations, and (iii) conduct the first field tests documenting endogenous matching behaviors of economic agents in productive teams based on their cooperative type.