Pirates in the Lab: Using Incentivized Choice Experiments to Explore Preference for (Un)Authorized Content

We started the project by selecting the movies on which our subjects were to place a value. We picked 30 movies produced after 1990 from the “TOP 250” list posted by a leading website (imdb.com) with the duration of each movie being between 100 and 125 minutes. We developed a web-based pilot survey showing the title, genre, year of premiere, short description, and trailer of each production. Our 49 student responders were asked to imagine they were planning to spend the following 2 hours watching movies and to rate each of the titles on a scale of 1 to 6, where 1 indicated they did not want to see the movie at all and 6 meant they did want to see it very much. We were able to come up with a list of seven movies where 78% of the subjects surveyed rated at least one of them as a 5 or 6. The screenshot of the typical question from the pilot survey is presented in Figure A1.