Nudging the Digital Pirate: Piracy and the Conversion of Pirates to Paying Customers

Hashim, Matthew J. Ph.D., Purdue University, December 2011. Nudging the Digital Pirate: Piracy and the Conversion of Pirates to Paying Customers. Major Professors: Karthik N. Kannan and Jackie M. Rees Ulmer. Digital piracy is a significant source of concern facing software developers, music labels, and movie production companies. The current legal and technological strate­ gies for mitigating the piracy problem have been largely unsuccessful, as firms continue to invest in litigation and digital rights management technologies to thwart piracy. Their e↵orts are quickly defeated by hackers and pirates, motivating the behavioral approach taken in this dissertation. In Chapter 2, we consider the common argument from digital media producers and government entities that there are victims of piracy, whereas pirates may perceive their actions to be victimless. Because of the victimless view, in certain circumstances, perceived moral obligations may become important determinants of piracy behavior. In particular, we theorize that attitudes and social norms could influence perceptions of moral obligation as a consequence of the desire to rationalize unethical behavior. We also identify circumstances under which exoge­ nous nudging from a software company can influence the impact of perceived moral obligations on intentions to pirate. Initial purchase and piracy conversion settings are compared to document when the salient constructs become relevant to the potential pirate. In Chapter 3, we explore the role of information targeting and its e↵ect on coor­ dination in a multi-threshold public goods game. We consider four treatments, three in which we give feedback about other member’s contributions to a subsample of group members, and another treatment in which feedback is not provided at all. Our three information treatments vary in whom receives the information, which can be given randomly, to those whose contributions are below the average of their group,