Entertainment Without Borders: The Impact of Digital Technologies on Government Cultural Policy
Journal of Management Information Systems
Revisiting the incentive to tolerate illegal distribution of software products
Decision Support Systems
Optimal Software Free Trial Strategy: The Impact of Network Externalities and Consumer Uncertainty
Information Systems Research
Effects of Piracy on Quality of Information Goods
Management Science
Journal of Global Information Management
Consumer Piracy Risk: Conceptualization and Measurement in Music Sharing
International Journal of Electronic Commerce
Entertainment Without Borders: The Impact of Digital Technologies on Government Cultural Policy
Journal of Management Information Systems
Computers and Industrial Engineering
Experience information goods: "Version-to-upgrade"
Decision Support Systems
Hi-index | 0.01 |
Technological advances in digitalization and communications technologies have aggravated the information goods piracy problem. In contrast to previous literature which mainly considers solutions, such as law enforcement or technology protection that work on increasing individual piracy costs to alleviate the piracy problem, we consider using versioning as a potential instrument to fight piracy. We show that while a single version is the optimal strategy for an information goods provider absent piracy, the presence of piracy may lead firms to offer more than one quality, and versioning can be an effective and profitable instrument to fight piracy for digital information goods under some conditions. Our results indicate that the incentive to version is greater when the piracy cost is in a certain range. This strategic interaction between piracy cost and product line design has an interesting implication on optimal investment in piracy control. We also find that versioning can act as both a strategic substitute and a strategic complement to other instruments that increase consumer piracy costs. We further provide a general model, as a nonlinear mixed-integer program, that would assist an information goods provider in determining how many versions to offer, at what quality levels and prices.