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Knowledge commons play a pivotal role in knowledge creation and sharing in the digital economy. The motivation for this research was the opportunity to develop a knowledge commons for IT service management (ITSM) practitioners. To obtain guidance to design the knowledge commons, we critically reviewed commons design principles (DPs) that were based on a well-established economics theory. We observed that the commons DPs had significant gaps when applied to IS practice. Hence, we developed an alternate set of DPs that we refer to as platform-enabled knowledge commons (PEKC) DPs that are relevant to IS practice. This paper discusses the development of PEKC DPs and applies them in instantiating an IS artifact, Service-Symphony. Service-Symphony is a purpose-built, public-facing knowledge repository developed for the benefit of ITSM practitioners and students. Our research followed the design science research (DSR) paradigm and contributes to the body of knowledge by establishing a multigrounded design theory comprising meta-requirements and DPs. To bridge theory and practice, we assessed the reusability of PEKC DPs through focus group interviews with IS architects. Our case study illustrates the complete life cycle of DPs covering conceptualization, initial formulation, iterative refinement, application to an important real-world instantiation, and evaluation by a group of independent IS practitioners.

Tools for clinical examination have not fundamentally evolved since the invention of the stethoscope by René Laennec in the nineteenth century. However, three decades ago, the medical community started to consider repurposing ultrasound scanners to improve physical examinations. A broad community of healthcare professionals trained in the new clinical examination paradigm could not be created due to the very high price of portable ultrasound scanners available on the market. In this paper, we study an Open-Source Hardware (OSH) community that aims to improve diagnosis in hospitals and medically underserved areas worldwide. They are designing an echo-stethoscope – a portable ultrasound scanner – that would be affordable in low and middle-income countries. The variety of expertise pooled to achieve this objective puts this knowledge common (KC) at the crossroads of open-source software (OSS), OSH, and medical communities. Unlike typical KC outcomes, an ultrasound probe is a physical object. Development and innovation in the physical world bring social dilemmas that the community has to overcome, restrictions in terms of openness, and in this case, unintended privatization. Our study uses the governing knowledge common framework (GKCF), a modified institutional analysis and development framework, to untangle the interactions between resources, participants, and governance structures. Our research describes why and how the creation of a physical object subject to industry regulation influences the evolution and governance of the KC. We provide evidence that temporary privatization of the KC can be used as a way to protect and sustain a common during the industrialization phase. We also demonstrate how a portfolio of projects is an effective and resilient way to help the common survive this privatization step.

The Chinese government has long been suspected of hiring as many as 2 million people to surreptitiously insert huge numbers of pseudonymous and other deceptive writings into the stream of real social media posts, as if they were the genuine opinions of ordinary people. Many academics, and most journalists and activists, claim that these so-called 50c party posts vociferously argue for the government’s side in political and policy debates. As we show, this is also true of most posts openly accused on social media of being 50c. Yet almost no systematic empirical evidence exists for this claim or, more importantly, for the Chinese regime’s strategic objective in pursuing this activity. In the first large-scale empirical analysis of this operation, we show how to identify the secretive authors of these posts, the posts written by them, and their content. We estimate that the government fabricates and posts about 448 million social media comments a year. In contrast to prior claims, we show that the Chinese regime’s strategy is to avoid arguing with skeptics of the party and the government, and to not even discuss controversial issues. We show that the goal of this massive secretive operation is instead to distract the public and change the subject, as most of these posts involve cheerleading for China, the revolutionary history of the Communist Party, or other symbols of the regime. We discuss how these results fit with what is known about the Chinese censorship program and suggest how they may change our broader theoretical understanding of “common knowledge” and information control in authoritarian regimes.

How does the economy respond to news about future policies or future fundamentals? Standard practice assumes that agents have common knowledge of such news and face no uncertainty about how others will respond. Relaxing this assumption attenuates the general equilibrium effects of news and rationalizes a form of myopia at the aggregate level. We establish these insights within a class of games which nests, but is not limited to, the New Keynesian model. Our results help resolve the forward-guidance puzzle, offer a rationale for the front-loading of fiscal stimuli, and illustrate more broadly the fragility of predictions that rest on long series of forward-looking feedback loops.

In the Lucas imperfect information model, output responds to unanticipated monetary shocks. We incorporate more general information structures into the Lucas model and demonstrate that output also responds to (dispersedly) anticipated monetary shocks if the information is imperfect common knowledge. Thus, the real effects of money consist of the unanticipated part and the anticipated part, and we decompose the latter into two effects, an imperfect common knowledge effect and a private information effect. We then consider an information structure composed of public and private signals. The real effects disappear when either signal reveals monetary shocks as common knowledge. However, when the precision of private information is fixed, the real effects are small not only when a public signal is very precise, but also when it is very imprecise. This implies that a more precise public signal can amplify the real effects and make the economy more volatile.

We propose a criterion of approximate incentive compatibility, strategy-proofness in the large (SP-L), and argue that it is a useful second-best to exact strategy-proofness (SP) for market design. Conceptually, SP-L requires that an agent who regards a mechanism’s “prices” as exogenous to her report—be they traditional prices as in an auction mechanism, or price-like statistics in an assignment or matching mechanism—has a dominant strategy to report truthfully. Mathematically, SP-L weakens SP in two ways: (1) truth-telling is required to be approximately optimal (within epsilon in a large enough market) rather than exactly optimal, and (2) incentive compatibility is evaluated ex interim, with respect to all full-support i.i.d. probability distributions of play, rather than ex post with respect to all possible realizations of play. This places SP-L in between the traditional notion of approximate SP, which evaluates incentives to manipulate ex post and as a result is too strong to obtain our main results in support of SP-L, and the traditional notion of approximate Bayes-Nash incentive compatibility, which, like SP-L, evaluates incentives to manipulate ex interim, but which imposes common knowledge and strategic sophistication assumptions that are often viewed as unrealistic.

Characterizations of Nash equilibrium, correlated equilibrium, and rationalizability in terms of common knowledge of rationality are well known. Analogous characterizations of sequential equilibrium, (trembling hand) perfect equilibrium, and quasi-perfect equilibrium in n -player games are obtained here, using earlier results of Halpern characterizing these solution concepts using non-Archimedean fields.

The biological approach to culture focuses almost exclusively on processes of social learning, to the neglect of processes of cultural coordination including joint action and shared intentionality. In this paper, we argue that the distinctive features of human culture derive from humans' unique skills and motivations for coordinating with one another around different types of action and information. As different levels of these skills of 'shared intentionality' emerged over the last several hundred thousand years, human culture became characterized first by such things as collaborative activities and pedagogy based on cooperative communication, and then by such things as collaborative innovations and normatively structured pedagogy. As a kind of capstone of this trajectory, humans began to coordinate not just on joint actions and shared beliefs, but on the reasons for what we believe or how we act. Coordinating on reasons powered the kinds of extremely rapid innovation and stable cumulative cultural evolution especially characteristic of the human species in the last several tens of thousands of years. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines'.

Stalnaker (Context, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014) defends two ideas about common ground. The first is that the common ground of a conversation is definable in terms of an iterated propositional attitude of acceptance, so that p is common ground iff p is commonly accepted. The second is the idea that the “default setting\" of conversational acceptance is belief, so that as a default, what is accepted in conversation coincides with what is (commonly) believed. In this paper, I argue that we should favor a pair of contrasting theses instead. First, I argue that we should identify the common ground with what is common knowledge about what is accepted, so that p is common ground iff it is common knowledge that p is accepted. Thus the attitude that is iterated in the definition of common ground is not acceptance but knowledge. Second, I argue that the “default setting\" for conversational acceptance is not belief, but knowledge.

People often coordinate for mutual gain, such as keeping to opposite sides of a stairway, dubbing an object or place with a name, or assembling en masse to protest a regime. Because successful coordination requires complementary choices, these opportunities raise the puzzle of how people attain the common knowledge that facilitates coordination, in which a person knows X, knows that the other knows X, knows that the other knows that he knows, ad infinitum. We show that people are highly sensitive to the distinction between common knowledge and mere private or shared knowledge, and that they deploy this distinction strategically in diverse social situations that have the structure of coordination games, including market cooperation, innuendo, bystander intervention, attributions of charitability, self-conscious emotions, and moral condemnation.