“Hacking for good: Leveraging HackerOne Data to Develop an Economic Model of Bug Bounties” examines the effectiveness of bug bounty programs in a bid to address the issues surrounding them as well as other associated parameters. The literature review is interesting and impressive, taking a close look into bug bounty terrain and drawing on critical market reports and contributions by cyber security professionals. These findings show some essential things. For the first time, the study estimates the elasticity of hacker supply and finds that hackers are price-insensitive. The implication is that it contradicts the usual economic presumptions about the workings of the bug bounty programs. Secondly, the idea that bug bounties are useful only to big companies is false. Of particular importance is the industry effect, which suggests different bug levels between industries. For example, some buggy software was more frequently found in finance than in the retail sector. The document focuses on the difficulty of forecasting the future of bug bounty programs, including predicting where it can be headed, considering that such programs will surely exhaust talent availability sooner or later. The study conducted powerful statistical analyses but also noted that there were unexplained variations, suggesting the bug bounty phenomenon is incomprehensible. In sum, the paper adds important knowledge about why our world needs more studies of the market forces that shape the bug bounty economy.

Works Cited
K. Sridhar and M. Ng, “Hacking for good: Leveraging HackerOne data to develop an economic model of bug bounties,” Journal of Cybersecurity, vol. 7, no. 1, Mar. 2021, doi: 10.1093/cybsec/tyab007.