TY  - BOOK
AU  - Luo,Hong
AU  - Mortimer,Julie Holland
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - Infringing Use as a Path to Legal Consumption: Evidence from a Field Experiment 
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 2019///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
N1  - January 2019; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - 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
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w25453
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w25453
ER  -