Which Enemy to Dance with? A New Role of Software Piracy in Influencing Antipiracy Strategies

Can Sun (), Yonghua Ji () and Xianjun Geng ()
Additional contact information
Can Sun: International Institute of Finance, School of Management, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China
Yonghua Ji: School of Business, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2R6, Canada
Xianjun Geng: A. B. Freeman School of Business, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana 70118

Information Systems Research, 2023, vol. 34, issue 4, 1711-1727

Abstract: Software piracy is a challenging issue faced by software firms and governments all over the world. To control software piracy, firms exert considerable effort in antipiracy measures. This paper uses game theoretical models to study how software firms should determine their antipiracy efforts and product prices. There are two unique aspects of our model. First, antipiracy efforts have both a direct effect and a cross effect on software piracy. Second, we capture two types of competitions when piracy exists: one between a legitimate product and its pirated counterpart, and the other between two pirated products. We find several interesting results. We show that due to pirated products’ buffer effect not studied before, eliminating piracy does not necessarily mean higher profit for firms. This reveals an unexplored advantage of desktop software comparing with Software as a Service (SaaS) that can totally eliminate piracy. Direct and cross effects have different impacts on firms’ decisions and profits. Opposite to what one might expect, when a firm’s antipiracy effort becomes more effective in increasing the cost of pirating its own product but not its competitor’s product, the firm becomes worse off under certain conditions. By contrast, if the antipiracy effort’s cross effect is higher, therefore increasing the cost of pirating its competitor’s product, a firm will always be better off. The managerial implication is that if a firm ignores the cross effect, it could underinvest in antipiracy effort, causing its profit to suffer.

Keywords: piracy; direct effect; cross effect; network effect; SaaS (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/isre.2023.1219 (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:inm:orisre:v:34:y:2023:i:4:p:1711-1727

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Information Systems Research from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().