Digital Piracy, Creative Productivity, and Customer Care Effort: Evidence from the Digital Publishing Industry

Xiaolin Li (), Chenxi Liao () and Ying Xie ()
Additional contact information
Xiaolin Li: Department of Management, London School of Economics and Political Science, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom
Chenxi Liao: CUHK Business School, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong
Ying Xie: Naveen Jindal School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas 75080

Marketing Science, 2021, vol. 40, issue 4, 685-707

Abstract: We empirically investigate how writers’ output is affected by copyright piracy using data from a Chinese digital publishing platform. We identify two measurements of writers’ output—creative productivity and customer care—which are also affected by readers’ feedback through purchasing, tipping, and commenting. We take advantage of an exogenous event—the termination of a free personal storage service and search function by a leading Chinese cloud storage provider in June 2016—to causally identify the effects of the resulting reduced copyright piracy on writers’ efforts. Using a difference-in-differences modeling approach, we compare the changes in average writer behavior before and after the event across two groups of writers: (1) writers who have profit-sharing contracts with the platform and (2) those who do not. We find that after the termination, contracted writers increased their creative productivity efforts in terms of quantity without sacrificing quality but reduced their customer care efforts. However, these effects are absent for noncontracted writers. Our study is among the first to provide empirical support for the positive effect of digital intellectual property rights infringement reduction on creative productivity.

Keywords: intellectual property rights; digital piracy; emerging markets; content creation; incentive and productivity; difference-in-differences (DID) model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2020.1275 (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:ormksc:v:40:y:2021:i:4:p:685-707

Access Statistics for this article

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