Infringing Use as a Path to Legal Consumption: Evidence from a Field Experiment /
Luo, Hong.
Infringing Use as a Path to Legal Consumption: Evidence from a Field Experiment / Hong Luo, Julie Holland Mortimer. - Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2019. - 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white); - NBER working paper series no. w25453 . - Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w25453. .
January 2019.
Copyright infringement may result from frictions preventing legal consumption, but may also reveal demand. Motivated by this fact, we run a field experiment in which we contact firms that are caught infringing on expensive digital images. Emails to all firms include a link to the licensing page of the infringed image; for treated firms, we add links to a significantly cheaper licensing site. Making infringers aware of the cheaper option leads to a fourteen-fold increase in the ex-post licensing rate. Two additional experimental interventions are designed to reduce search costs for (i) price and (ii) product information. Both interventions-immediate price comparison and recommendation of images similar to those infringed-have large positive effects. Our results highlight the importance of mitigating user costs in small-value transactions.
System requirements: Adobe [Acrobat] Reader required for PDF files.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
Infringing Use as a Path to Legal Consumption: Evidence from a Field Experiment / Hong Luo, Julie Holland Mortimer. - Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2019. - 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white); - NBER working paper series no. w25453 . - Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w25453. .
January 2019.
Copyright infringement may result from frictions preventing legal consumption, but may also reveal demand. Motivated by this fact, we run a field experiment in which we contact firms that are caught infringing on expensive digital images. Emails to all firms include a link to the licensing page of the infringed image; for treated firms, we add links to a significantly cheaper licensing site. Making infringers aware of the cheaper option leads to a fourteen-fold increase in the ex-post licensing rate. Two additional experimental interventions are designed to reduce search costs for (i) price and (ii) product information. Both interventions-immediate price comparison and recommendation of images similar to those infringed-have large positive effects. Our results highlight the importance of mitigating user costs in small-value transactions.
System requirements: Adobe [Acrobat] Reader required for PDF files.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.