But before I get to the academic theory, I'm going to start with a story about an encounter I had with some serial pranksters my freshman year in college. (While I'm not pretending to be deep, this is going somewhere. Please indulge me.) For some reason, these three gentlemen decided that I would be the perfect target for their continued attentions. Without going into the painful details, suffice it to say that at some point I decided that it had to stop. I called up about a dozen friends and gave them the dorm room phone number of the three gentlemen in question. I told them to call the number, pretend that they thought they were calling Pizza World, and try to order a large pie and liter of soda. It struck me at the time as a lame idea for revenge, but it was the best one that I had.
The operation was to commence at 2:00 PM. At 2:15, the first call came in. The next one came in at 2:40. Then 2:55. Then 3:15. By 4 PM, the calls were coming about every 15 minutes. By 6, the next call was coming almost as soon as the previous one ended. My victims' phone continued to ring non-stop until around midnight, at which point the calls began tapering off, finally petering out altogether at around 2 AM. As the calls came in, the details became more imaginative. “I saw a fiyer on campus offering a free liter of soda with a large pie.” “I clipped a coupon for a free topping from the Daily Targum [the college newspaper].” The targets of my joke soon came to believe that I had blanketed all of the university with their phone number, and that the calls would keep coming until they changed their numbers. I didn't provide any of these details to the callers; they made them up on their own.
The next day, when I called my friends back to thank them for a job well done, several of them begged me to continue the joke for a second night. One of them said that he had random people from his dorm floor standing in a line that stretched halfway down the hall, waiting for their turn to make a call. Many of them would then go to the end of the line and start over, eager for a second shot at the prank. Most of these people didn't know me or their targets. But it turned out that I had hit upon the ideal formula for a practical joke. Given an opportunity to participate with little risk of getting caught, a high percentage of college students who are hanging out on a dorm floor will commit surprising amounts of time and creativity to random acts of mischief. Some of my anonymous allies may have taken satisfaction in believing that they were bringing justice down on some bullies (even if they didn't quite know who the bullies are or why they needed justice to come down on them). Others undoubtedly just wanted to get away with something. The beauty of the setup is that both kinds of motivations could be satisfied at a cost that was low enough for them to act. The key lesson here is that certain kinds of costs constrain behavior more than we realize. Lower the cost, lower the barrier to participation sufficiently, and you cross a kind of event horizon of human participation. Suddenly, the normal rules no longer apply.
Let's look at a slightly less frivolous example. On Sunday, July 30th, 2006, in response to the news that Blackboard had obtained a patent on certain learning technologies, I created a Wikipedia page entitled History of Virtual Learning Environments 1. One of the primary motivations was to begin gathering prior art that was relevant to the patent. The text of my entry consisted of exactly one sentence:
This page will chronicle the history of virtual learning environment (VLE) development.
One week later, there were more than 160 edits logged for the page. Almost none of them were mine. In fact, the vast majority of them were by people who each contributed one single entry about projects about which they had personal knowledge. Looking at the page today, it is a highly structured scholarly work with 89 external references and a consistent editorial style, despite the fact that literally hundreds of people have contributed to it. As of this writing, the last edit to it was on October 27, 2007. Yesterday. So it is still under active development by somebody, even though the first author (me) hasn't touched it in over a year. None of these people were paid to contribute, and there was no formal editorial process or approval structure. And yet, people do continue to invest their time in the document. Some of them may be doing so out of concern over the Blackboard patent (either because they have a direct economic stake in seeing it invalidated or because they have a more idealistic commitment to the principles involved); others may simply be interested in documenting the history of an aspect of their profession and in ensuring that their contribution to it gets recognized. Still others may have no specific interest in the subject matter but may be interested in maintaining the overall editorial quality of Wikipedia. The important point is that, when costs of participation are low enough, any of these motivations may be sufficient to lead to a contribution.
It turns out that this is the key to understanding both Coase and Benkler, both capitalist firms and open source communities.
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