In the present world, the companies on using the open source projects have been tend to increase in the innovation and productivity which is beneficial in sustaining the competence. These involve various developers across the globe who may be contributing to several other projects, they constantly engage with the project to improve and uplift the overall project. In each open source project, the level of intensity and the motivation with which the developers engage and contribute vary among time. Initially the research is aimed to identify how the engagement and activity of the developers in open source projects vary over time. Secondly to assess the reasons over the variance in engagement activities of the developers involved in various open source projects. Firstly, a literature review was conducted to identify the list of available metrics that are helpful to analyse the developer’s engagement in open source projects. Secondly, we conducted a multi-case study, that involved the investigation of developer’s engagement in 10 different open source projects of Apache foundation. The GitHub repositories were mined to gather the data regarding the engagement activities of the developers over the selected projects. To identify the reasons for the variation in engagement and activity of developers, we analysed documentation about each project and also interviewed 10 developers and 5 instructors, who provided additional insights about the challenges faced to contribute in open source projects. The results of this research contain the list of factors that affect the developer’s engagement with open source projects which are extracted from the case studies and are strengthened through interviews. From the data that is collected by performing repository mining, the selected projects have been categorized with the increase, decrease activeness of developers among the selected projects. By utilizing the archival data that is collected from the selected projects, the factors corporate support, community involvement, distribution of issues and contributions to open source projects and specificity of guidelines have been identified as the crucial and key factors upon the success of the open source projects reflecting the engagement of contributors. In addition to this finding the insights on using open source projects are also collected from both perspectives of developers and instructors are presented.  This research had provided us a deeper insight on the working of open source projects and driving factors that influence engagement and activeness of the contributors. It has been evident from this research that the stated factors corporate support, community involvement, distribution of issues and contributions to open source projects and specificity of guidelines impacts the engagement and activeness of the developers. So, the open source projects minimally satisfying these projects can tend to see the increase of the engagement and activeness levels of the contributors. It also helps to seek the existing challenges and benefits upon contributing to open source projects from different perspectives.

An organizational strategy to develop software has appeared in the market. Organizations release software source code open and hope to attract volunteers to improve their software, forming what we call an open source project. Examples of organizations that have used this strategy include IBM (Eclipse), SAP (Netweaver) and Mozilla (Thunderbird). Moreover, thousands of these projects have been created as a consequence of the growing amount of software source code released by individuals. This expressive phenomenon deserves attention for its sudden appearance, newness and usefulness to public and private organizations. To explain the dynamics of open source projects, this research theoretically identified and empirically analyzed a construct – attractiveness – found crucial to them due to its influence on how they are populated and operate, subsequently impacting the qualities of the software produced and of the support provided. Both attractiveness' causes and consequences were put under scrutiny, as well as its indicators. On the side of the consequences, it was theoretically proposed and empirically tested whether the attractiveness of these projects affects their levels of activeness, efficiency, likelihood of task completion, and time for task completion, though not linearly, as task complexity could moderate the relationships between them. Also, it was argued at the theoretical level that activeness, efficiency, likelihood of task completion, and time for task completion mediate the relationship between attractiveness and software/support quality. On the side of attractiveness' causes, it was proposed and tested that five open software projects' characteristics (license type, intended audience, type of project and project’s life-cycle stage) impact attractiveness directly. Additionally, these projects' characteristics were argued to influence projects' levels of activeness, efficiency, likelihood of task completion, and time for task completion (and so an empirical evaluation of their associations was performed). The empirical tests of all these relationships between constructs were carried out using Structural Equation Modeling with Maximum Likelihood on three samples of over 4,600 projects each, collected from the largest repository of open source software, Sourceforge.net (a repeated cross-sectional approach). The results confirmed the importance of attractiveness, suggesting a direct influence on projects' dynamics, as opposed to the moderated-by-task complexity indirect paths first proposed. Furthermore, all four projects' characteristics studied were found to significantly influence projects' attractiveness, activeness, efficiency, likelihood of task completion, and time for task completion (with the exception of license type and time for task completion). Besides providing a statistical test of these propositions, this study discovered the direction of the influence of each project characteristic on projects' attractiveness, activeness, efficiency, likelihood of task completion and time for task completion. Lastly, conclusions, limitations, and future directions are discussed based on these findings.

This dissertation consists of three essays on theoretical analysis of economic agents' decision making and incentives. Chapter 1 gives an outline of the subjects to be examined in the subsequent chapters and shows their conclusions in brief. Chapter 2 explores the decision problem of a superordinate (a principal) regarding whether to delegate its authority or right to make a decision to a subordinate (an agent) in an organization. We first study the optimal contracting problem of the superordinate that specifies the allocation of the authority and wage in a principal-agent setting with asymmetric information, focusing on two motives for delegation, "informative" and "effort-incentive-giving" delegation. Further, we suggest delegating to multiple agents as a way of addressing the asymmetric information problem within an organization, focusing on another motive for delegation, "strategic" delegation. Chapter 3 analyzes the behavior of players in a particular type of contest, called "the weakest-link contest". Unlike a usual contest in which the winning probability of a group in a contest depends on the sum of the efforts of all the players in the group, the weakest-link contest follows a different rule: the winning probability of a group is determined by the lowest effort of the players in the group. We first investigate the effort incentives of the players in the weakest-link contest, and then check whether the hungriest player in each group, who has the largest willingness to exert effort, has an incentive to incentivize the other players in his group in order to make them exert more effort. Chapter 4 examines the decision making of software programmers in the software industry between an open source software project and a commercial software project. Incorporating both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation on open source project participation into a stylized economic model based on utility theory, we study the decision problem of the programmers in the software industry and provide the rationale for open source project participation more clearly. Specifically, we examine the question of how the programmers' intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, and abilities affect their project choices between an open source project and a commercial project, and effort incentives. / Ph. D.