The Downside of Full Pay Transparency

Salary Transparency at Stack Overflow - Stack Overflow

We believe (and developers tell us) that job seekers should be empowered with as much information as possible when looking for a job – especially salary. So we ran an experiment on Stack Overflow Jobs to see if the evidence would support it. Remarkably, we learned that job listings which include a salary range got 75% more clicks than job listings that don’t. With this experiment, we’re even more convinced that transparency isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s good for companies, too. Along with much of the tech community, we were impressed with Buffer’s boldness and leadership in salary transparency. So…

The Effect of Payment Transparency on Consumption: Quasi-Experiments from the Field

Recent research suggests that the method of making a payment can influence the willingness to pay and consumption behavior. In this manuscript, we argue that payment mechanisms differ from each other along the dimensions of transparency, and that the degree of transparency correlates positively with the pain of paying using the mechanism, and negatively with consumption and spending. We replicate previous experimental results using quasi-experiments from the field, and find that the lower the payment transparency, the greater is the consumption. However, this effect is weak for products whose consumption rates are inflexible.

Introducing open revenue sharing

AKA: You can soon help itch.io pay its bills

Improving Customer Compatibility with Tradeoff Transparency

Through a large-scale field experiment with 393,036 customers considering opening a credit card account with a nationwide retail bank, we investigate how providing transparency into an offering’s tradeoffs affects subsequent rates of customer acquisition and long-run engagement. Although we find tradeoff transparency to have an insignificant effect on acquisition rates, customers who were shown each offering’s tradeoffs selected different products than those who were not. Moreover, prospective customers who experienced transparency and subsequently chose to open an account went on to exhibit higher-quality service relationships over time. Monthly spending was 9.9% higher and cancellation rates were 20.5% lower among those who experienced transparency into each offering’s tradeoffs. Increased product use and retention accrued disproportionately to customers with prior category experience: more-experienced customers who were provided transparency spent 19.2% more on a monthly basis and were 33.7% less likely to defect after nine months. Importantly, we find that these gains in engagement and retention do not come at the expense of customers’ financial well-being: the probability of making late payments was reduced among customers who experienced transparency. We further find that the positive effects of tradeoff transparency on engagement and retention were attenuated in the presence of a promotion that provided financial incentives to choose particular offerings. Taken together, these results suggest that providing transparency into an offering’s tradeoffs may be an effective strategy for informing customer choices, leading to better outcomes for customers and firms alike. This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management. Funding: Funding for this research, apart from the costs Commonwealth Bank of Australia internally incurred to support the experiment, was provided by Harvard Business School. R. W. Buell has received compensation from Commonwealth Bank of Australia in the past for executive education teaching. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.4985 .

GitLab & Buffer CEOs talk transparency at scale

The two transparency advocates recently met to talk about openness in business, what they keep confidential, and some things they've learned as their companies grow.

Nobody pays for open source. We can force them to. | Seldo.com

Thirty years of voluntary funding schemes haven't paid open source maintainers because asking doesn't scale. The real money already flows — to JFrog, Docker, Sonatype — at the registry layer. The fix: registries charge companies for supply (they already do), then route a slice automatically to the maintainers who make that supply worth having.

Open Source, Incentives, and Why 'Monetize Later' Often Backfires

How misaligned incentives undermine open source projects — and why 'monetize later' often leads to the very restrictions open source was meant to avoid.

How Big Tech wrote secrecy into EU law to hide data centres’ environmental toll

Environmental footprint of Europe's data centres kept secret after industry lobbying in a move legal experts warn could violate transparency rules.

Should We Treat Data as Labor? Moving Beyond “Free”

Should We Treat Data as Labor? Moving beyond "Free" by Imanol Arrieta-Ibarra, Leonard Goff, Diego Jiménez-Hernández, Jaron Lanier and E. Glen Weyl. Published in volume 108, pages 38-42 of AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018, Abstract: In the digital economy, user data is typically treated as capi...

Public Benefit Limited Liability Company: The New Entity on the Block

A public benefit LLC has additional requirements to be transparent, accountable and uphold its public benefit purpose while maintaining fiduciary duties.

Software Sharing for Modern Companies | Fair.io

Fair Source is an alternative to closed source, allowing you to safely share access to your core products. Fair Source Software (FSS) can be used with minimal restrictions, and becomes Open Source after a period of time.

Software Sharing for Modern Companies | Fair.io

Fair Source is an alternative to closed source, allowing you to safely share access to your core products. Fair Source Software (FSS) can be used with minimal restrictions, and becomes Open Source after a period of time.

Disclosure: Psychology Changes Everything

We review literature examining the effects of laws and regulations that require public disclosure of information. These requirements are most sensibly imposed in situations characterized by misaligned incentives and asymmetric information between, for example, a buyer and seller or an advisor and advisee. We review the economic literature relevant to such disclosure and then discuss how different psychological factors complicate, and in some cases radically change, the economic predictions. For example, limited attention, motivated attention, and biased assessments of probability on the part of information recipients can significantly diminish, or even reverse, the intended effects of disclosure requirements. In many cases, disclosure does not much affect the recipients of the information but does significantly affect the behavior of the providers, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. We review research suggesting that simplified disclosure, standardized disclosure, vivid disclosure, and social comparison information can all be used to enhance the effectiveness of disclosure policies.