The economics of sharing

Economist.com article: (subscription required)

"Economists have not always found it easy to explain why self-interested people would freely share scarce, privately owned resources. Their understanding, though, is much clearer than it was 20 or 30 years ago: co-operation, especially when repeated, can breed reciprocity and trust, to the benefit of all. In the context of open source, much has been written about why people would share technical talent, giving away something that they also sell by holding a job in the information-technology industry. The reason often seems to be that writing open-source software increases the authors' prestige among their peers or gains them experience that might help them in the job market, not to mention that they also find it fun.......

"One of the most articulate proponents of the open-source approach, Yochai Benkler of Yale Law School, argues in a recent paper* that sharing is emerging for certain physical, rivalrous goods and will probably increase due to advances in technology."