Piracy and Movie Revenues : Evidence from Megaupload by Christian Peukert, Jörg Claussen : : SSRN
►http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2176246
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.
On peut télécharger l’intégralité de l’article (3 p. en pdf, dont une de tableaux de résultats des ANOVAs…)
L’échantillon est de 1344 films dans 49 pays, de la semaine 31 en 2007 à la semaine 35 en 2012. Les chiffres du box office viennent de boxofficemojo.com.
La conclusion complète (un tout petit peu plus détaillée que dans l’abstract) :
Our counterintuitive finding 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. The information-spreading effect of illegal downloads seems to be especially important for movies with smaller audiences. ‘Traditional’ theories that predict substitution may be more applicable to blockbusters.
We aim to contribute to the emerging empirical literature on the effects of piracy. We believe that the setting we study offers a unique opportunity for causal identification. Our results have implications for theory and firm strategy in practice, but may also contribute to the recent global debate on copyright in the digital society.