PI: Angelo Mele, PhD (Carey Business School)
Co-Is: Co-Pierre Georg
Modern software development involves collaborative efforts and re-use of existing software packages and libraries, to reduce the cost of developing new software. However, package dependencies expose developers to the risk of contagion from bugs or other vulnerabilities that may cost billions of dollars. This project will model the maintainers’ decisions to create dependencies among software libraries in an equilibrium strategic network formation game. After estimating the parameters of such model using data from https://libraries.io, we can quantify and understand the externality imposed by such dependencies in terms of contagion risk from bugs or other vulnerabilities. This analysis will provide a measure of systemic risk for a software ecosystem.
Angelo Mele is an Associate Professor of Economics at Johns Hopkins University – Carey Business School. His research analyses how social and strategic interactions affect individual and aggregate socioeconomic outcomes. His work has been published in Econometrica, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics and The Review of Economics and Statistics. He has a PhD in Economics from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
