If the merger is approved, the business media association would become part of the content division of the software association.
"More information produces better results," said Mr. Wolfers, a professor of economics at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, who wrote the paper with David Rothschild, an economist at Microsoft Research, a division of the software company.
Microsoft plans to ask the federal judge overseeing the antitrust case against it for authority to obtain hundreds of pages of government records and for permission to summon witnesses to argue that the proposed division of the software giant into two companies is unwarranted.
This month marks the 20th anniversary of Microsoft Research, perhaps the most consistently interesting division of the hulking software company.
Mr. Davis, 30, is a principal product manager in the collaboration technologies division of the Oracle Corporation, the software developer in Redwood Shores, Calif.; he works in Manhattan.
"Of its five major divisions," said Brent Thill, the software analyst for Citigroup, "the online division is the only one that loses money.
The company is also planning to reorganize the company's management to better segment different divisions of its software business, a move that may streamline Sun's operations and could potentially make portions of the business more attractive to acquirers.
In 1998, Mr. Cigale, then general manager of the software division at Princeton Review, felt an entrepreneurial itch.
The effective use of RF bypassing is dependent on the architecture's division of work between the software and the hardware.
It grew up mirroring the classic division of responsibility in the software world: One company made and sold the program, another (typically a consulting firm) set up the system, billing by the hour.
