Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/215038 
Year of Publication: 
2019
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 8036
Publisher: 
Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo), Munich
Abstract: 
The emergence of online providers aggregating illegal content from streaming platforms is rekindling the debate about online piracy. In the past, the discussion mainly focused on the impact of piracy in content industries and the effect of anti-piracy measures. But little is known about one crucial aspect of piracy: consumers' motivations to use illegal channels. Yet, understanding consumers' behavior could help practitioners and policymakers to allocate their resources better to fight online piracy. In this paper, we fill this gap by focusing on two main motives for the illegal consumption of online content: paying lower (zero) prices and having access to content that is not available in legal channels. To disentangle the role of each motivation in consumers' choice, we ran a laboratory experiment with real consumption, a methodology that provides participants with incentives to reveal their true preferences about consumption while controlling for the choice environment and the consideration set. Our results suggest that consumers turn to illegal channels primarily to save on the price of content, and that they are less sensitive to the availability of content in legal and illegal channels. We discuss the implications of our findings for practitioners and policymakers.
Subjects: 
piracy
digitization
movies
free
release windows
experiment
Document Type: 
Working Paper
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