Digital piracy and the perception of price fairness

Michal Krawczyk, Anna Kukla-Gryz and Joanna Tyrowicz

No 2015-24, Working Papers from Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw

Abstract: We focus on the relationship between pricing of cultural goods and willingness to download their unauthorized versions. Building on equity theory we propose that perceiving a price as overly high provides a self-justification for downloading content from unauthorized sources. In a large-scale online experiment on customers of a major e-book store we employ the Bayesian Truth Serum to induce truthful confessions of acquiring content from unauthorized sources. We confirm that self-reported downloading from unauthorized sources is associated with having experienced overpricing. We also relate it to endorsing relatively positive views on the role of file-sharing services and believing that "pirate's" motives are relatively principled, while those of abstainers are rather pragmatic.

Keywords: inequality; longevity; defined contribution; defined benefit; Gini (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 C93 D12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-ict, nep-ipr, nep-pr~, nep-mkt and nep-net
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.wne.uw.edu.pl/index.php/download_file/1879/ First version, 2015 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:war:wpaper:2015-24

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Marcin Bąba ().