Faculty Bibliography

Many field public goods are provided by a small number of contributors: the “superstars” of their respective communities. This paper focuses on Wikipedia, one of the largest online volunteering platforms. Over 9 consecutive years, we study the relationship between social preferences – reciprocity, altruism, and social image – and field cooperation. Wikipedia editors are quite prosocial on average, and superstars even more so. But while reciprocal and social image preferences strongly relate to contribution quantity among casual editors, only social image concerns continue to predict differences in contribution levels between superstars. In addition, we find that social image driven editors – both casual and superstars – contribute lower quality content on average. Evidence points to a perverse social incentive effect, as quantity is more readily observable than quality on Wikipedia.

This article offers a reconceptualization of class-in-capitalism and its articulation with racialization and gender that builds on critical strands of Marxian thought and integrates insights from Black radical and feminist socialist traditions. Rather than a transhistorical materialist conception of class simpliciter, we develop a historically-specific conception of class embedded within an analysis of capitalist social relations. The result is an account of class based not on the appropriation of a “material surplus,” but on asymmetrical social relations in the division of labor and disposition of its fruits. Developing this conception along three key axes of asymmetries—property, production, and personhood—we show how the dynamics propelled by capitalist social relations are co-constitutive with those of racialization, while both the privatization of reproduction and gender-based super-exploitation are systemic features of these dynamics. We emphasize law’s role in the history of these relations, and end with implications of our analysis for their transformation.

Throughout the history of capitalism law has been a major component of the social and material context that structured social relations of production, creating and legitimating a distinct combination of freedom and coercion, opportunity and imperative, that has been the driving dynamic of capitalism ever since. It did so by structuring access to natural resources for purposes of subsistence and market-oriented production, coordination and cooperation in labor and investment processes, access to means of payment and credit, and the allocation of risk and uncertainty attendant to production. It also differentially constrained market access to labor roles, training, and credit along lines of gender and race, leveraging gendered roles in reproduction and gendered and racialized status subordination into hyper-exploitative gendered and racialized class relations, in turn reinforcing atavistic status subordination even under a veil of juridical equality. Over the past three centuries, it has done so through a series of power struggles among competing groups and ideas, within and outside the legal profession, and structured asymmetric power in social relations along dimensions of class, gender, and race. This article analyzes the role of law and legal theory at major transition points in capitalism, particularly the Gilded Age and the rise of neoliberalism. Repeatedly, in all these battles, academics and judges harnessed legal theory and transposed the broader emerging ideological trends of the professional and managerial class to legitimate and contest the newly emerging, often more exploitative relations. The article ends with implications for the design and justification of a post-neoliberal regime.

Defining a just economy in a tenuous social-political time. If we can agree that our current social-political moment is tenuous and unsustainable—and indeed, that may be the only thing we can agree on right now—then how do markets, governments, and people interact in this next era of the world? A Political Economy of Justice considers the strained state of our political economy in terms of where it can go from here. The contributors to this timely and essential volume look squarely at how normative and positive questions about political economy interact with each other—and from that beginning, how to chart a way forward to a just economy. A Political Economy of Justice collects fourteen essays from prominent scholars across the social sciences, each writing in one of three lanes: the measures of a just political economy; the role of firms; and the roles of institutions and governments. The result is a wholly original and urgent new benchmark for the next stage of our democracy.

Hate speech, disinformation, and polarization are underwritten by deeply rooted media market dynamics involving the profitability of stoking anger and providing easy, identity-confirming outrage. Solutions therefore must focus on changing the payoffs to selling outrage and hatred. This essay offers two approaches that aim to make the outrage industry internalize the externalities of its business model. The first is a reconsideration of defamation laws. The second is the creation of a regulatory framework mandating transparency from companies that profit from advertisements in outrage media content. There would be a publicly curated database that makes transparent which companies have advertising associated with hateful content. Civic organizations and citizens would be encouraged to apply economic and social pressure on corporations to divest from this type of content. The essay discusses the benefits and drawbacks of these approaches, offering them as potential short-term solutions to a problem that will require long-term intervention.

Organizations are riddled with cooperation problems, that is, instances in which workers need to voluntarily exert effort to achieve efficient collective outcomes. To sustain high levels of cooperation, the experimental literature demonstrates the centrality of reciprocal preferences but has also overlooked some of its negative consequences. In this paper, we ran lab-in-the-field experiments in the context of open-source software development teams to provide the first field evidence that highly reciprocating groups are not necessarily more successful in practice. Instead, the relationship between high reciprocity and performance can be more accurately described as U-shaped. Highly reciprocal teams are generally more likely to fail and only outperform other teams conditional on survival. We use the dynamic structure of our data on field contributions to demonstrate the underlying theoretical mechanism. Reciprocal preferences work as a catalyst at the team level: they reinforce the cooperative equilibrium in good times but also make it harder to recover from a negative signal (the project dies). Our results call into question the idea that strong reciprocity can shield organizations from cooperation breakdowns. Instead, cooperation needs to be dynamically managed through relational contracts.

We present the first full description of Media Cloud, an open source platform based on crawling hyperlink structure in operation for over 10 years, that for many uses will be the best way to collect data for studying the media ecosystem on the open web. We document the key choices behind what data Media Cloud collects and stores, how it processes and organizes these data, and open API access as well as user-facing tools. We also highlight the strengths and limitations of the Media Cloud collection strategy compared to relevant alternatives. We give an overview two sample datasets generated using Media Cloud and discuss how researchers can use the platform to create their own datasets.

Online peer production communities such as Wikipedia typically rely on a distinct class of users, called administrators, to enforce cooperation when good faith collaboration fails. Assessing one’s intentions is a complex task, however, especially when operating under time-pressure with a limited number of (costly to collect) cues. In such situations, individuals typically rely on simplifying heuristics to make decisions, at the cost of precision. In this paper, we hypothesize that administrators’ community governance policy might be influenced by general trust attitudes acquired mostly out of the Wikipedia context. We use a decontextualized online experiment to elicit levels of trust in strangers in a sample of 58 English Wikipedia administrators. We show that low-trusting admins exercise their policing rights significantly more (e.g., block about 81% more users than high trusting types on average). We conclude that efficiency gains might be reaped from the further development of tools aimed at inferring users’ intentions from digital trace data.

Power and productivity mediate economic outcomes across markets–both product markets and labor markets. We develop a neoclassical economic framework that combines productivity and power, and presents the balance between them as an equilibrium outcome determined by strategic investments–by firms, consumers and workers–in law, technology, (mis)perceptions and ideology. An actor’s choice of investment–most important, the choice between a productivity-increasing investment and a power-increasing investment–can be explained by the relative marginal return from the different investments. Whereas the incentives of firms and consumers and those of firms and workers are roughly aligned with respect to productivity-increasing investments, they are diametrically opposed with respect to power-increasing investments. Since investments affect surplus and thus the resources available for future investment, the model features multiple equilibria and path dependence. Policy intervention may be needed to shift the market from a bad equilibrium, with low productivity and adverse distributive consequences, to a more efficient and more equitable equilibrium. Policy intervention may also be needed to control welfare-reducing, power-seeking investments. While some degree of market power may be needed to support long-term efficiency, innovation and economic growth, firms will often seek excessive market power that will reduce overall welfare. Policymakers should strive to optimize power structures across different markets, e.g., by influencing the relative return from different power-increasing and productivity-increasing investments. The explanatory power of our theoretical framework is demonstrated through a series of detailed case studies–from the home broadband and net neutrality wars and the antitrust battles of Microsoft and now Google to the struggles between firms and unions during 19th century industrialization and the evolving story of Uber and the gig economy. Our framework informs ongoing debates in antitrust law, labor and employment law, intellectual property law, and consumer protection law, and in any other area of law that regulates, directly or indirectly, product or labor markets.

By the middle of March, the Democratic primary had effectively ended and the enormity of the Covid-19 pandemic and its human and economic cost began to sink in. The response to the pandemic had already been thoroughly politicized several weeks earlier such that news and information about the pandemic were mediated by political media systems. While the rest of the American media ecosystem focused on describing the pandemic, its economic costs, and criticizing the president for his response, conservative media presented a thoroughly partisan view of events and proactively defended and supported the actions and inactions of the president. For audiences of conservative media, information about the pandemic was communicated not through politically neutral public health authorities but was instead filtered and propagated through media channels shaped by many decades of partisan politics. The mainstream media coverage of the pandemic that got the most attention was highly critical of the president’s response, which may have deepened the politically-rooted differences in perspectives on the pandemic. Compared to conservative media, there was far greater deference among media sources on the center and left to views and perspectives of public health authorities and experts. This report, based on an ecosystem-wide analysis of political media coverage, spans the period of March, April, and May, when the spread and magnitude of the pandemic in the United States became clear, and the response of the government was communicated to the public and debated in the media. In March, coverage of the pandemic dominated political media on both sides of the political spectrum, though significantly less so on the right. The proportion of media attention to the pandemic diminished in April and May on the left. On the right, attention to the pandemic dropped off steeply. In April, conservative media and their audiences devoted substantial attention to coverage of the allegations of sexual harassment by Tara Reade against Joe Biden. In May, there was far more attention in conservative media to relitigating the origins of the Russia investigation under the banner of Obamagate than to the pandemic, which had already exacted a terrible cost and was nowhere near being under control. The collective judgment of the conservative media ecosystem was that this largely unsubstantiated storyline rooted in grievance politics was more deserving of the attention of the American public. For Biden supporters, the drop in attention to Covid-19 was picked up by negative coverage of the Trump administration on other issues. Sanders supporters followed a similar path until the death of George Floyd at the end May took up their attention. This was not replicated in the Biden set. Consistent with our findings in January-February, at the peak of the primaries season, Sanders supporters here too appear more focused on progressive issues, while Biden supporters are largely focused on criticism or rejection of Trump. The basic asymmetric and polarized structure of American political media has changed little over the past several years, and this time period is no exception. The potent role of conservative media in the election victory of Trump in 2016 rested on two distinct factors: first, Trump’s success in securing favorable coverage and strong support in conservative media, and second, the success that conservative media had in influencing media coverage outside of conservative media. The willingness of conservative media and audiences to defend and support Trump is clearly evident during these months. Trump continued to receive strong support in conservative media, which acted to divert, deflect, and reframe negative coverage, despite the rash of negative coverage criticizing the administration’s response to the pandemic. The evidence also points to a further isolation of conservative media in American political discourse and a system less able to shape discourse and coverage outside of its own confines, leaving Americans in more starkly divided epistemic worlds. The administration-friendly narratives about the pandemic and Obamagate got little to no traction outside of conservative media. This finding matches what we found in a prior report in which we describe the inability of conservative media to shape coverage of the Hunter Biden scandal outside of right-wing media during January and February 2020, a pattern that is repeated in October 2020. Neither President Trump nor conservative media have lost their ability to influence the media agenda. For example, in a recent report we describe how Trump was able to create a controversy about mail-in voter fraud that prompted media coverage across the political spectrum. The sexual harassment allegations lodged by Tara Reade against Joe Biden ultimately got a public airing—something conservative media pushed hard on. Despite the fact that the impetus to address this topic came also from the left, the media attention garnered in conservative media was not matched in the center and left. The key difference is that while President Trump and conservative media can still make news, their power to interpret and frame the narrative around key events beyond conservative media is more constrained than in 2016. The asymmetric credibility gap between conservative media and the rest of the media ecosystem appears to have deepened. And professional media seem to succumb less readily to the “bias of balance” problem that had bedeviled much of mainstream coverage of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016. There is plentiful evidence of disinformation in political discourse among partisan media and on social media. The problem is far more acute on the right than the left and considerable attention on the far right is tied to the growing QAnon conspiracy. This development is a troubling symptom of the state of political discourse in the United States and translates into real-world costs. However, the impact of top-down propaganda and disinformation is still a greater problem in the United States, particularly so in relation to Covid-19, as tens of millions of Americans have taken unnecessary risks and helped spread the pandemic because they were misinformed about the dangers of contracting the disease and the value of measures deemed effective by public health authorities in reducing the chance of infection, such as social distancing or mask wearing. Many people, including public health specialists and the general public, have come to the conclusion that compared to the relative successes of other countries in addressing the Covid-19 pandemic, the United States response has been a failure, costing innumerable lives and leaving tens of thousands with long-term health problems, while deepening and extending the economic and social consequences of the pandemic. A large minority of Americans fundamentally disagree with this assessment. These divergent worldviews, the symptom of a larger epistemic crisis in the United States tied to asymmetrically polarized media systems, greatly complicate efforts to effectively meet such collection action challenges, and undermine democratic governance. In this paper, we describe how American media ecosystems are able to sustain such different worldviews and contribute to the mishandling and miscommunication of the pandemic. This report is the second in a series of reports that cover the months running up to the November election.

The decisions voters will make at the ballot box on November 3, 2020 will be influenced in no small part by the media coverage of the candidates and issues, including the reporting by journalists, the media personalities and pundits on radio and television, text messages and campaign phone calls, podcasts, political ads, and for many, the incessant flow of social media posts of friends and family. In this report, the first of a series of reports that cover the months running up to the November election, we track political discourse in the United States for January and February of 2020, the period of time just before (Covid-19) began to dominate political discourse. We also describe the longer-term structure of political media ecosystems in the United States that shape public discourse by curating, amplifying, and propagating political stories and narratives to distinct political audiences. The agenda of political media in January and February 2020 centered on the impeachment of the president, the Democratic primaries, and the killing of Qasem Soleimani. This agenda was picked up throughout the media ecosystem, but there were stark differences across the media camps in the framing and narrative contours applied to these topics, presenting radically different depictions of the underlying evidence, facts, and interpretation of events. These differences between media spheres that often extend beyond spin and emphasis reflect and reinforce the depth and strength of the divide in American politics. Mainstream media described in great detail the rationale for impeaching the president, while in right-wing media the ‘call was perfect’ and the impetus for impeachment was a concocted charade, a witch hunt, to illegitimately overturn the 2016 election. Mainstream media described a rash decision by President Trump to order a missile strike on General Soleimani that was then sold to the American public on the false pretenses of a clear and imminent threat of attack against United States embassies. Conservative media hailed the killing as a decisive strike against adversaries that has unquestionably increased American security and standing in the world. While mainstream media coverage devoted similar levels of attention to the Democratic primaries and the impeachment of the president in January, and a majority of their attention to the primary race in February, politically engaged users on social media were more focused on partisan one-upmanship. For Democrats, attention was directed at the impeachment and the missteps of Trump and his administration, and in February, the intervention of Attorney General Barr and the Department of Justice in the sentencing of Roger Stone. Republicans, in turn, focused their attention on time-honored political foes: Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership, Hillary Clinton, and the hostile and biased mainstream media. The patterns of attention on both sides are consistent with a view that negative partisanship plays a dominant role in American politics. Trump supporters on Facebook provided an exception to the pattern of negative coverage where celebratory videos of appearances and events of Trump were popular. Negative polarization spilled over into the Democratic primary race, which came down to a battle between progressives pursuing a platform of aggressive action on healthcare, climate change, and social and economic justice versus those that put regaining the White House above all else and saw a moderate candidate as a better bet. The media coverage promoted by Sanders supporters placed major focus on the candidate and his policy positions. In contrast, Biden supporters were oriented towards negative coverage of Trump. The outcome of the Democratic race is in keeping with the tenet that negative partisanship dominates American politics. Conservatives in America appear to have survived the barrage of negative coverage from mainstream media with their partisan perspectives and belief systems intact. This is not because conservative media erected an impermeable barrier against negative coverage from the center and left. Politically engaged conservatives were informed of the damaging coverage, but were unfailingly offered a reinterpretation and reframing of events and a plausible alternative narrative designed to preempt any second thoughts about allegiance to party and president. In deflecting and reframing negative coverage, the tactics employed by conservative media follow a well-developed pattern: downplay the validity of the story; deflect attention to the other side; attack the integrity and motives of sources; reinforce distrust in media outside of the right wing; and invoke a strong partisan framing to activate political identity. The formidable narrative crafting power of conservative media is employed not as a mechanism for accountability among its participants and leaders and not to police against disinformation and substandard reporting. Instead, it is wielded as a buffer against external influence and against deviance from the party line. This leaves the system vulnerable to misleading and false reporting and to those propagating conspiracies, such as the Gateway Pundit and True Pundit. Hyperpartisan media sources, which thrive on outrage and frequently misinform their audiences, play a prominent role in conservative media. On the left, partisan and hyperpartisan outlets play a much smaller role and less frequently propagate stories unconfirmed by mainstream media. The biggest change we observe in these first two months of 2020 compared to the election cycle of four years ago is the degree to which conservative media activists have shaped mainstream media coverage. In 2016, right-wing media activists succeeded in influencing mainstream coverage of Hillary Clinton, particularly on the unsubstantiated allegations of wrongdoing associated with the Clinton Foundation, which exacerbated and fed upon coverage of her emails and fueled suspicions of corruption and dishonesty. In the current election cycle, conservative media activists rolled out the same playbook that was so successful in 2016. This time, the corruption allegations were focused on Joe Biden, his son Hunter, and their dealings with Ukraine and China. This story was picked up by mainstream media in 2019, but the core allegation—that Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to remove a prosecutor in order to protect his son—fell apart under scrutiny. By January 2020, while conservative media continued to push out exaggerated and false claims, the dominant mainstream framing of this story had shifted to Donald Trump’s abuse of his presidential power for his own political gain, which overshadowed the well-established and misguided actions of Hunter Biden to cash in on his father’s name. The discredited allegations of corrupt dealings by Joe Biden were getting no play in mainstream media. While conservative media continues to exhibit a remarkable capacity for reframing news coverage to align with the beliefs and perceptions of its core audiences, in January and February of 2020, its power to shape mainstream media coverage was diminished compared to 2016. This is the most notable change we observe and has the potential to alter the electoral calculus in the November election.

The claim that election fraud is a major concern with mail-in ballots has become the central threat to election participation during the COVID-19 pandemic and to the legitimacy of the outcome of the election across the political spectrum. President Trump has repeatedly cited his concerns over voter fraud associated with mail-in ballots as a reason that he may not abide by an adverse electoral outcome. Polling conducted in September 2020 suggests that nearly half of Republicans agree with the president that election fraud is a major concern associated with expanded mail-in voting during the pandemic. Few Democrats share that belief. Despite the consensus among independent academic and journalistic investigations that voter fraud is rare and extremely unlikely to determine a national election, tens of millions of Americans believe the opposite. This is a study of the disinformation campaign that led to widespread acceptance of this apparently false belief and to its partisan distribution pattern. Contrary to the focus of most contemporary work on disinformation, our findings suggest that this highly effective disinformation campaign, with potentially profound effects for both participation in and the legitimacy of the 2020 election, was an elite-driven, mass-media led process. Social media played only a secondary and supportive role. Our results are based on analyzing over fifty-five thousand online media stories, five million tweets, and seventy-five thousand posts on public Facebook pages garnering millions of engagements. They are consistent with our findings about the American political media ecosystem from 2015-2018, published in Network Propaganda , in which we found that Fox News and Donald Trump’s own campaign were far more influential in spreading false beliefs than Russian trolls or Facebook clickbait artists. This dynamic appears to be even more pronounced in this election cycle, likely because Donald Trump’s position as president and his leadership of the Republican Party allow him to operate directly through political and media elites, rather than relying on online media as he did when he sought to advance his then-still-insurgent positions in 2015 and the first half of 2016. Our findings here suggest that Donald Trump has perfected the art of harnessing mass media to disseminate and at times reinforce his disinformation campaign by using three core standard practices of professional journalism. These three are: elite institutional focus (if the President says it, it’s news); headline seeking (if it bleeds, it leads); and balance , neutrality, or the avoidance of the appearance of taking a side. He uses the first two in combination to summon coverage at will, and has used them continuously to set the agenda surrounding mail-in voting through a combination of tweets, press conferences, and television interviews on Fox News. He relies on the latter professional practice to keep audiences that are not politically pre-committed and have relatively low political knowledge confused, because it limits the degree to which professional journalists in mass media organizations are willing or able to directly call the voter fraud frame disinformation. The president is, however, not acting alone. Throughout the first six months of the disinformation campaign, the Republican National Committee (RNC) and staff from the Trump campaign appear repeatedly and consistently on message at the same moments, suggesting an institutionalized rather than individual disinformation campaign. The efforts of the president and the Republican Party are supported by the right-wing media ecosystem, primarily Fox News and talk radio functioning in effect as a party press. These reinforce the message, provide the president a platform, and marginalize or attack those Republican leaders or any conservative media personalities who insist that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud associated with mail-in voting. The primary cure for the elite-driven, mass media communicated information disorder we observe here is unlikely to be more fact checking on Facebook. Instead, it is likely to require more aggressive policing by traditional professional media, the Associated Press, the television networks, and local TV news editors of whether and how they cover Trump’s propaganda efforts, and how they educate their audiences about the disinformation campaign the president and the Republican Party have waged.

Benkler describes the results of a large-scale study of the political media ecosystem duringthe 2016 US presidential campaign and the first year of the Trump presidency. The majorfinding is that the American political media ecosystem is asymmetrically polarized, with aninsular, well-defined right wing, and the rest of the media ecosystem, from the center-right to the far left,forming a single media ecosystem anchored by traditional media organizations like the NewYork Times or the Washington Post. The structure renders the American right moresusceptible to propaganda and disinformation than the left. The chapter then offers ananalysis of why political economy, rather than technology, was the source of thisasymmetry, outlining the interactions between political culture, law and regulation, andcommunications technology that have underwritten the emergence of the propaganda feedbackloop in the right wing of the American media ecosystem, and outlines the structural driversof the present epistemic crisis.

Wikipedia has been a useful utopia for conceiving how people could cooperate productively without market relations and hierarchies. Despite the limitations of that vision and disappointments with recent history, Wikipedia remains a critical anchor for working alternatives to neoliberalism.

Market democracies struggle with economic insecurity and growing inequality, presenting new threats to democracy. The revival of “political economy” offers a frame for understanding the relationship between productivity and justice in market societies. It reintegrates power and the social and material context — institutions, ideology, and technology — into our analysis of social relations of production, or how we make and distribute what we need and want to have. Organizations and individuals, alone and in networks, struggle over how much of a society’s production happens in a market sphere, how much happens in nonmarket relations, and how embedded those aspects that do occur in markets are in social relations of mutual obligation and solidarism. These struggles involve efforts to shape institutions, ideology, and technology in ways that trade off productivity and power, both in the short and long term. The outcome of this struggle shapes the highly divergent paths that diverse market societies take, from oligarchic to egalitarian, and their stability as pluralistic democracies.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Is social media destroying democracy? Are Russian propaganda or "Fake news" entrepreneurs on Facebook undermining our sense of a shared reality? A conventional wisdom has emerged since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 that new technologies and their manipulation by foreign actors played a decisive role in his victory and are responsible for the sense of a "post-truth" moment in which disinformation and propaganda thrives. Network Propaganda challenges that received wisdom through the most comprehensive study yet published on media coverage of American presidential politics from the start of the election cycle in April 2015 to the one year anniversary of the Trump presidency. Analysing millions of news stories together with Twitter and Facebook shares, broadcast television and YouTube, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the architecture of contemporary American political communications. Through data analysis and detailed qualitative case studies of coverage of immigration, Clinton scandals, and the Trump Russia investigation, the book finds that the right-wing media ecosystem operates fundamentally differently than the rest of the media environment. The authors argue that longstanding institutional, political, and cultural patterns in American politics interacted with technological change since the 1970s to create a propaganda feedback loop in American conservative media. This dynamic has marginalized centre-right media and politicians, radicalized the right wing ecosystem, and rendered it susceptible to propaganda efforts, foreign and domestic. For readers outside the United States, the book offers a new perspective and methods for diagnosing the sources of, and potential solutions for, the perceived global crisis of democratic politics.

The rise of fake news highlights the erosion of long-standing institutional bulwarks against misinformation in the internet age. Concern over the problem is global. However, much remains unknown regarding the vulnerabilities of individuals, institutions, and society to manipulations by malicious actors. A new system of safeguards is needed. Below, we discuss extant social and computer science research regarding belief in fake news and the mechanisms by which it spreads. Fake news has a long history, but we focus on unanswered scientific questions raised by the proliferation of its most recent, politically oriented incarnation. Beyond selected references in the text, suggested further reading can be found in the supplementary materials.

Over the past 25 years, social science research in diverse fields has shifted its best explanations of innovation from (a) atomistic invention and development by individuals, corporate or natural, to networked learning; (b) market based innovation focused on material self interest to interaction between market and non market practices under diverse motivations; and (c) property rights exclusively to interaction between property and commons. These shifts have profound implications for how we must think about law and innovation. Patents, copyrights, non compete agreements, and trade secret laws are all optimized for an increasingly obsolete worldview. Strong intellectual property impedes, rather than facilitates, innovation when we understand that knowledge flows in learning networks, mixing market and non market models and motivations, and weaving commons with property are central to the innovation process.

In this study, we analyze both mainstream and social media coverage of the 2016 United States presidential election. We document that the majority of mainstream media coverage was negative for both candidates, but largely followed Donald Trump’s agenda: when reporting on Hillary Clinton, coverage primarily focused on the various scandals related to the Clinton Foundation and emails. When focused on Trump, major substantive issues, primarily immigration, were prominent. Indeed, immigration emerged as a central issue in the campaign and served as a defining issue for the Trump campaign. We find that the structure and composition of media on the right and left are quite different. The leading media on the right and left are rooted in different traditions and journalistic practices. On the conservative side, more attention was paid to pro-Trump, highly partisan media outlets. On the liberal side, by contrast, the center of gravity was made up largely of long-standing media organizations steeped in the traditions and practices of objective journalism. Our data supports lines of research on polarization in American politics that focus on the asymmetric patterns between the left and the right, rather than studies that see polarization as a general historical phenomenon, driven by technology or other mechanisms that apply across the partisan divide. The analysis includes the evaluation and mapping of the media landscape from several perspectives and is based on large-scale data collection of media stories published on the web and shared on Twitter.

From free and open source software, through Wikipedia to video journalism, peer production plays a more significant role in the information production environment than was theoretically admissible by any economic model of motivation and organization that prevailed at the turn of the millennium. Its sustained success for a quarter of a century forces us to reevaluate three core assumptions of the standard models of innovation and production. First, it places intrinsic and social motivations, rather than material incentives, at the core of innovation, and hence growth. Second, it challenges the centrality of property, as opposed to the interaction of property and commons, to growth. And third, it questions the continued centrality of firms to the innovation process.

This volume provides a comprehensive and multidisciplinary view of the field of user and open innovation, reflecting advances in the field over the last several decades.

This article examines the public debate over net neutrality in the United States in 2014. We compiled, mapped, and analyzed more than 15,600 stories published on net neutrality, augmented by data from Twitter, Bitly, and Google Trends. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines link analysis with qualitative content analysis, we describe the evolution of the debate over time and assess the role, reach, and influence of different media sources and advocacy groups. By three different measures, we find that the pro-net neutrality forces decisively won the online public debate and translated this into a successful social mobilization effort. We conclude that a diverse set of actors working in conjunction through the networked public sphere played a pivotal role in turning around the Federal Communications Commission policy on net neutrality.

Intelligence does not arise only in individual brains; it also arises in groups of individuals. This is collective intelligence: groups of individuals acting collectively in ways that seem intelligent.

In this paper we study the public debate over net neutrality in the United States from January through November 2014. We compiled, mapped, and analyzed over 16,000 stories published on net neutrality, augmented by data from Twitter, bit.ly, and Google Trends. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines link analysis with qualitative content analysis, we describe the evolution of the debate over time and assess the role, reach, and influence of different media sources and advocacy groups in setting the agenda, framing the debate, and mobilizing collective action. We conclude that a diverse set of actors working in conjunction through the networked public sphere played a central, arguably decisive, role in turning around the Federal Communications Commission policy on net neutrality.

The impressive success of peer production – a large-scale collaborative model of production primarily based on voluntary contributions – is difficult to explain through the assumptions of standard economic theory. The aim of this paper is to study the prosocial foundations of cooperation in this new peer production economy. We provide the first field test of existing economic theories of prosocial motives for contributing to real world public goods. We use an online experiment coupled with observational data to elicit social preferences within a diverse sample of 850 Wikipedia contributors, and seek to use to those measures to predict subjects’ field contributions to the Wikipedia project. We find that subjects’ field contributions to Wikipedia are strongly related to their level of reciprocity in a conditional Public Goods game and in a Trust game and to their revealed preference for social image within the Wikipedia community, but not to their level of altruism either in a standard or in a directed Dictator game. Our results have important theoretical and practical implications, as we show that reciprocity and social image are both strong motives for sustaining cooperation in peer production environments, while altruism is not.

The article considers several working anarchies in the networked environment, and whether they offer a model for improving on the persistent imperfections of markets and states. I explore whether these efforts of peer mutualism in fact offer a sufficient range of capabilities to present a meaningful degree of freedom to those who rely on the capabilities it affords, and whether these practices in fact remain sufficiently nonhierarchical to offer a meaningful space of noncoercive interactions. The real utopias I observe here are perfect on neither dimension. Internally, hierarchy and power reappear, to some extent and in some projects, although they are quite different than the hierarchy of government or corporate organization. Externally, there are some spectacular successes, some failures to thrive, and many ambiguous successes. In all, present experience supports neither triumphalism nor defeatism in the utopian project. Peer models do work, and they do provide a degree of freedom in the capabilities they provide. But there is no inexorable path to greater freedom through voluntary open collaboration. There is a good deal of uncertainty and muddling through. The last part of the article suggests a theory of freedom that supports the significance of even these obviously imperfect peer systems with incomplete coverage of necessary human capabilities, and explains why expanding the domain of mutualism improves freedom and well-being under conditions of persistent market imperfection and an inevitably fallible state. Peer mutualism doesn’t have to be perfect; it merely needs to offer a new dimension or sufficient diversity in how it instantiates capabilities and transmits power to offer us, who inhabit the systems that these peer systems perturb, a degree of freedom.

The paper reviews evidence from eight wireless markets: mobile broadband; wireless healthcare; smart grid communications; inventory management; access control; mobile payments; fleet management; and secondary markets in spectrum. I find that markets are adopting unlicensed wireless strategies in mission-critical applications, in many cases more so than they are building on licensed strategies. If the 1990s saw what was called "the Negroponte Switch" of video from air to wire, and telephony from wire to air, the present and near future are seeing an even more fundamental switch. Where a decade ago most of our wireless capacity was delivered over exclusive control approaches-both command and control and auctioned exclusivity--complemented by special-purpose shared spectrum use, today we are moving to a wireless infrastructure whose core relies on shared, open wireless approaches, complemented by exclusive control approaches for special, latency-intolerant, high-speed mobile applications. The scope of the latter will contract further if regulation catches up to technological reality, and opens up more bands to open wireless innovation, with greater operational flexibility and an emphasis on interoperability.

From the Hardcover edition.