Voluntary Environmental Programs (VPs) involving industry and regulatory agencies have emerged as the promise of the future in environmental policy circles. Although the number of these agreements is increasing in OECD countries, there are still concerns about their effectiveness; in particular that “free-riding” behavior may be difficult to avoid within VPs. Free riding occurs when one firm be...

The peer-to-peer (P2P) system has prevailed on the Internet. The old client-server architecture is gradually becoming unable to satisfy users’ various requests and deal with the heavy loading of networks. Many applications adopt P2P architecture to provide more flexible and efficient service. However, P2P systems are not flawless. The anarchic property of P2P systems keeps participant behaviour...

Luxury is a complex industrial activity whose products combine strong vertical differentiation and a meaning value for the consumer. Luxury offers experiences, the economy of which is based on signalling. This gives rise to intense intangible investment internalized by trademark law and vertical restraints in distribution. However, the extent of the added value and the power of externalities as...

We describe how social networks can help reduce certain situations of free riding in organizations. The technique uses the homophily of an organization’s social network to select an advisory monitoring peer group likely to share knowledge and skills with each participant, and therefore most able to detect free riding in situations requiring those skills. We illustrate this application in the co...

We propose a workload balancing based approach to discourage free riding in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network. The heart of our mechanism is to migrate some shared files from the overloaded peers to the neighbored free riders automatically and transparently, which enforces free riders to offer services when altruistic peers are heavily overloaded. The implementation techniques are discussed in detail....

In order to deal with free riding in P2P system, incentive mechanism or rating system is presented, and each user rating is computed by itself, which causes that some users exaggerate their ratings. In this paper, three aspects are developed for free riding and for improving service performance in P2P. First of all, it is useful to keep away fake rating that each user rating is calculated by th...

This paper investigates the performance of copycat funds, which are free-riding on disclosed asset holdings of actively managed mutual funds. On average, copycat funds are able to marginally outperform their target mutual funds, but the relative success of copycat funds has increased after 2004, when SEC regulation imposed all mutual funds to quarterly disclose their holdings. We document a sub...

This short paper provides an example which shows that the type of the spillover effect from one individual to another (and hence whether we under-tax, or overtax, in a Nash equilibrium relative to a cooperative one) can be reversed when we introduce dynamics into a model with public goods. Specifically, the spillover effect changes from positive (which is the static, traditional case) to negati...

This paper studies a setting where a principal needs to motivate teams of agents whose efforts lead to an outcome that stochastically depends on the combination of agents’ actions, which are not directly observable by the principal. In [1] we suggest and study a basic “combinatorial agency” model for this setting. In this paper we expose a somewhat surprising phenomenon found in this setting: c...

We show that, contrary to common belief, free riding is indeed possible in BitTorrent. We present a BitTorrent client implementation in Java which successfully downloads shared files without ever contributing a single byte of user data to the network. Surprisingly, this client often achieves the same download speed as the original BitTorrent client. This client is of particular interest for peo...