Incentivizing Deep Fixes in Software Economies

An important question in a software economy is how to incentivize deep rather than shallow fixes. A deep fix corrects the root cause of a bug instead of suppressing the symptoms. This paper initiates the study of the problem of incentive design for open workflows in fixing code. We model the dynamics of the software ecosystem and introduce subsumption mechanisms. These mechanisms only make use of externally observable information in determining payments and promote competition between workers. We use a mean field equilibrium methodology to evaluate the performance of these mechanisms, demonstrating in simulation that subsumption mechanisms perform robustly across various environment configurations and satisfy important criteria for market design. © 1976-2012 IEEE.