دانلود رایگان مقاله سرقت ادبی سکو نرم افزار بازار دو طرفه

abstract

This paper studies the impact of software piracy on prominent and non-prominent software developers in markets based on a two-sided platform business. User behavior is imperfect and, when adopting a platform, users only take prominent software into account. We show that prominent software exhibits higher piracy rates than nonprominent software. However, contrary to intuition, this does not necessarily mean that prominent software developers benefit more from increased software protection. Indeed, we show that prominent developers may lose out whereas non-prominent developers may gain from better software protection.

5. Conclusion

This article analyzes piracy in software markets that are characterized by two-sided network externalities. This issue is gaining importance as an increasing number of software markets are organized as two-sided business models (e.g., smartphone applications, e-books), and piracy appears to be a growing concern in those markets. This article argues that taking firm heterogeneity into account is an important factor when evaluating the effects of software piracy in such markets. We develop a model with imperfect consumer behavior where users only consider prominent software when choosing between competing platforms. We find that even though prominent pieces of software suffer from higher piracy rates, contrary to conventional wisdom, this does not necessarily mean that higher software protection benefits those firms. We show that relatively well-known products may indeed benefit from a low level of software protection whereas less known software products are hurt. The key to this result is that (i) there is tougher platform competition for prominent than for non-prominent developers and (ii) competition for prominent developers intensifies in the presence of low software protection so that license fees are reduced heavily for prominent software developers.