The Nature and Incidence of Software Piracy: Evidence from Windows

Susan Athey and Scott Stern

No 19755, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper evaluates the nature, relative incidence and drivers of software piracy. In contrast to prior studies, we analyze data that allows us to measure piracy for a specific product - Windows 7 - which was associated with a significant level of private sector investment. Using anonymized telemetry data, we are able to characterize the ways in which piracy occurs, the relative incidence of piracy across different economic and institutional environments, and the impact of enforcement efforts on choices to install pirated versus paid software. We find that: (a) the vast majority of "retail piracy" can be attributed to a small number of widely distributed "hacks" that are available through the Internet, (b) the incidence of piracy varies significantly with the microeconomic and institutional environment, and (c) software piracy primarily focuses on the most "advanced" version of Windows (Windows Ultimate). After controlling for a small number of measures of institutional quality and broadband infrastructure, one important candidate driver of piracy - GDP per capita - has no significant impact on the observed piracy rate, while the innovation orientation of an economy is associated with a lower rate of piracy. Finally, we are able to evaluate how piracy changes in response to country-specific anti-piracy enforcement efforts against specific peer-to-peer websites; overall, we find no systematic evidence that such enforcement efforts have had an impact on the incidence of software piracy.

JEL-codes: L86 O34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ict, nep-ino, nep-ipr, nep-pr~ and nep-iue
Note: IO PR
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published as The Nature and Incidence of Software Piracy: Evidence from Windows , Susan Athey, Scott Stern. in Economic Analysis of the Digital Economy , Goldfarb, Greenstein, and Tucker. 2015

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19755.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: The Nature and Incidence of Software Piracy: Evidence from Windows (2015)
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:nbr:nberwo:19755

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19755

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().