The 2014 Deutsche Bahn Prize went to Yann Algan and Émeric Henry - both researchers at Sciences Po's Departement of Economics - and to their co-authors Yochai Benckler and Jerome Hergeux (Harvard).

Each year, the Deutsche Bahn Prize rewards CEPR Fellows for outstanding research in organisation and management.

The paper - Social Motives and the Organization of Production: Experimental Evidence from Open Source Software - analyzes the behaviour of 1,200 open source software (OSS) developers and uses the behaviour of the OSS developers in experimental trust, dictator, and public games to predict and explain the behavior of OSS developers in software projects.
The authors find that those developers with higher social motivation tend to participate in fewer projects, but cooperate more intensively. By highlighting the role of social motivation and self-selection of like-minded types into project teams, the paper contributes to the important question of how organizations that are lacking formal structure and hierarchies can solve problems of free-riding of their members.

More about Yann Algan and his research - More about Émeric Henry and his research