Special Section: Information and Competitive Strategy in a Networked Economy

The special section of 2012 Journal of Management Information Systems deals with the incentives for distributed content generation; counterintuitive network effects in the security software market, which features an intrinsic negative externality; and the possibility for collaboration between different platforms in a two-sided market. Xiaoquan (Michael) Zhang and Chong (Alex) Wang, in 'Network Positions and Contributions to Online Public Goods: The Case of Chinese Wikipedia,' examine the impact the network structure may have to encourage social content contribution. 'Content Contribution for Revenue Sharing and Reputation in Social Media: A Dynamic Structural Model,' by Qian Tang, Bin Gu, and Andrew B. Whinston, estimates a dynamic structural model for the payoff function. Debabrata Dey, Atanu Lahiri, and Guoying Zhang provide an interesting twist on this standard story in their paper 'Hacker Behavior, Network Effects, and the Security Software Market, where a higher penetration, and thus larger, network, tends to decrease a user's ex ante benefit.