Knowonomics - The Economics of Knowledge Sharing

We propose an economic theory of knowledge sharing. The theory is grounded on game theory and experimental economics. This gives us a framework for analyzing knowledge sharing in different environments. The theory provides testable propositions about knowledge sharing. We used actual transaction data from a global knowledge management system to empirically test our hypotheses about free riding behavior. We additionally used an experimental environment to observe knowledge sharing behavior. The conducted experiments have been used to test our hypotheses about the free riding behavior and the conditional cooperation and reciprocity of knowledge sharing.