IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/17443.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Simple Economics of an External Shock on a Crowdsourced "Bug Bounty Platform"

Author

Listed:
  • Zrahia, Aviram
  • Gandal, Neil
  • Markovich, Sarit
  • Riordan, Michael

Abstract

In this paper, we first provide background on the "nuts and bolts" of a bug bounty platform a two-sided marketplace that connects firms and individual security researchers ("ethical" hackers) to find and be rewarded for discovering software vulnerabilities. We then empirically examine the effect of an exogenous external shock (Covid-19) on Bugcrowd, one of the two largest "two-sided" bug bounty platforms. The shock reduced the opportunity set for many security researchers who either lost their jobs or were placed on a leave of absence. We show that the exogenous shock led to a huge rightward (downward) shift in the supply curve and to an increase both in the number of submissions and new researchers on the platform. The results suggest that had there been a larger increase in number of firms with bug bounty programs on the platform, many more unique software vulnerabilities would have been discovered. We quantify the benefits to the platform from the exogenous shock which enables us to shed light on the benefits associated with the gig economy.

Suggested Citation

  • Zrahia, Aviram & Gandal, Neil & Markovich, Sarit & Riordan, Michael, 2022. "The Simple Economics of an External Shock on a Crowdsourced "Bug Bounty Platform"," CEPR Discussion Papers 17443, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:17443
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cepr.org/publications/DP17443
    Download Restriction: CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:17443. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cepr.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.