A fair share of studies analyzing “online piracy” are based on easily accessible student samples. However, it has been argued that the youths tend to have more lax social and ethical norms concerning both property rights and online behavior. In this study we present the results of a vignette...

We consider a monopolist producer of information goods that may be subject to unauthorized copying. The key feature of our model is that we allow consumers to have ethical concerns based on equity theory that may reduce their utility of such a copy. We derive the formulas describing demand for...

We report a laboratory experiment aimed at investigating factors affecting choice between different versions of a full-length movie. In particular, we estimate the willingness to pay for a legal, rather than pirated copy and compare it to the impact of such characteristics as picture quality or...

This study employs a vignette experiment to inquire, which features of online “piracy” make it ethically discernible from a traditional theft. This question is pertinent since the social norm concerning traditional theft is starkly different from the evidence on ethical evaluation of online...

Most developed countries have tried to restrain digital piracy by strength- ening laws against copyright infringement. In 2009, France implemented the Hadopi law. Under this law individuals receive a warning the first two times they are detected illegally sharing content through peer to peer...

In the case of digital piracy should rights be publicly or privately enforced? The emergence of large-scale anti-piracy laws and the existence of non-monitored illegal channels raise important issues for the design of digital anti-piracy policies. In this paper, we study the impact of these two...

We report the results of an experimental study analyzing the effects of Internet piracy on book sales. We conducted a year-long controlled large-scale field experiment with pre-treatment pair matching. Half of the book titles received experimental treatment, in which a specialized agency would...

The short-term effect of BitTorrent file-sharing on movie DVD sales is estimated using sales data on newly released DVDs and torrent file downloads during a 13-week period between March and May 2009 in the USA. To overcome endogeneity between downloads and sales, the analysis is carried out in a...

This paper analyzes the optimal choice of pricing schedules and technological deterrence levels in a market with digital piracy, when legal sellers can sometimes control the extent of piracy by implementing digital rights management (DRM) systems. It is shown that the seller's optimal pricing...