• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.27 no.11
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• pp.257-270
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• 2022

This paper analyzes the effect of profit incentives within the setting of bounty open source project. A simple decision-making model based on classical utility maximization is presented for open source developers that includes income effects from the bounty prize. We then simulate the decisions of multiple developers to assess the effect from the bounty prize. Our result shows that learning costs can greatly reduce the software quality improvement benefit from bounty project. It also suggests that open source projects can benefit more when they have multiple small bounty projects than a single large bounty project since it reduces the learning cost and the opportunity cost for the open source developers.