Piracy and Movie Revenues: Evidence from Megaupload. A Tale of the Long Tail?

Christian Peukert (), Jörg Claussen and Tobias Kretschmer

VfS Annual Conference 2013 (Duesseldorf): Competition Policy and Regulation in a Global Economic Order from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: In this paper we make use of a quasi-experiment in the market for illegal downloading to study movie box office revenues. Exogenous variation comes from the unexpected shutdown of the popular file hosting platform Megaupload.com on January 19, 2012. The estimation strategy is based on a quasi difference-in-differences approach. We compare box office revenues before and after the shutdown to a matched control group of movies unaffected by the shutdown. We find that the shutdown had a negative, yet insignificant effect on box office revenues.This counterintuitive result may suggest support for the theoretical perspective of (social) network effects where file-sharing acts as a mechanism to spread information about a good from consumers with zero or low willingness to pay to users with high willingness to pay.

JEL-codes: D83 L50 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul, nep-ipr, nep-pr~, nep-iue and nep-mkt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:vfsc13:79697

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