Piracy and Movie Revenues: Evidence from Megaupload Date: 2013 By: Peukert, Christian Claussen, Jörg Kretschmer, Tobias URL: d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:vfsc13:79697&r=cul 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 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. -- JEL: L50 L82 D83
Posted on: Mon, 10 Feb 2014 15:27:59 +0000
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