Using a unique conjoint data set drawn from 281 college students in Hong Kong. I estimate a random-coefficient discrete choice demand system for Microsoft Office from legal and various illegal sources. Counterfactual results show two things. First, most students would switch to Internet piracy...

As devices that used software became available to the masses the problem of software piracy arose. Recent theoretical works modeled the software piracy phenomenon; others tried to empirically explain the determinants that can explain this phenomenon. Empirical literature in the latter case is...

I quantify the effects of private-network music sharing on aggregate album sales in the BitTorrent era using a panel of US sales and private-network downloads for 2,109 albums during 2008. Exogenous shocks to the network's sharing constraints address the simultaneity problem. In theory,...

How do firms’ IP strategies respond to sudden increases in product-market imitation? Using a 2001 technological shock that enabled rising software piracy, we implement an instrumental-variables estimator to compare a treatment group of at-risk-of-piracy firms with matched not-at-risk control...

The software industry frequently maintains that software piracy is no more than theft and a cause of huge losses. Courts and other policy makers easily adopt that straightforward argument. Surprisingly, however, many software publishers do not employ any technological measures to protect their...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how different types of strategic interactions between two firms affect their optimal pricing and private copy protection levels of digital products. In our model, the firms do not directly interact with each other in terms of prices, but they become...

This paper bridges the organisational psychology and the economics of science literature to examine the role of ideology-based psychological contract breach in eliciting mild deviant behaviour in academia. We provide empirical evidence of how the deterioration of academic values related to the...

In this paper, we examine the relationship between income inequality and piracy rate in the presence of network effects. We build a theoretical framework which examines how income thresholds determine individual users' positive net benefits from piracy. We claim that the proportion of the...

This paper quantifies the relationship between private-network file sharing activity and music sales in the BitTorrent era. Using a panel dataset of 2,251 albums' U.S. sales and file sharing downloads on a private network during 2008, I estimate the effect of file sharing on album sales....

The existence of formal IPR laws can be considered a prerequisite for having efficient law enforcement but does not imply efficient enforcement in itself. A simple model is constructed to explain the interplay between the IPR law and human behavior within counterfeiting countries. It shows how a...