Spécialité: Sciences Économiques

The last decade has seen the advent and growth of two strongly linked phenomena which have led to important changes in the worldwide economy. The first is the development of the digital economy, based on the digitalisation of previously existing goods and on the development of new purely digital goods. The second is the development and generalisation of consumer piracy. The link between these two phenomena is clear, since nowadays consumer piracy is almost entirely related to digital goods. Since the issues of digital goods and piracy cannot be dissociated, this thesis has a dual objective. The first aim is to investigate the nature of digital goods and the impact of this nature on the economy. The second aim is to understand the cause of consumer piracy and the effect of piracy on the economy. It is shown that the digital nature of digital goods gives them the following economic characteristics: they are public goods, durable goods and experience goods. It is also be demonstrated that consumer piracy is a direct result of the public characteristic of digital goods and that, as such, piracy is also an economic characteristic of digital goods. The goal is, then, to analyse how the decisions of the economic agents – consumers, firms and governments – are affected by the different economic characteristics (including piracy) of digital goods and how these decisions may, in turn, change these characteristics. The first part of this thesis (Chapters 1 to 5), aims to answer to the first research question which relates to the issue of the publicness of digital goods. Chapter 1 discusses the assumption that digital goods are public goods and demonstrates that the publicness of digital goods depends on several factors which cause the level of publicness of digital goods to vary over time. Chapter 2 investigates the impact of the publicness of digital goods on consumer behaviour and shows that the extent of consumer piracy can be explained by the fact that pirating is, in fact, free riding. This chapter conjectures that pirating is rational behaviour only when the level of publicness of digital goods is sufficiently high. Chapter 3 is devoted to the analysis of the impact of the publicness of digital goods on the firms’ strategies, and more precisely focuses on consumer. This chapter assesses the impact of consumer piracy on firms and shows how, by adopting strategies allowing a decrease in the level of publicness, firms are able to fight against consumer piracy. Nevertheless, it is demonstrated that, regardless of the type of strategy chosen, consumer piracy forces firms to constantly innovate, in order to keep the publicness of the digital goods at a sufficiently low level. Chapter 4 examines the impact of the publicness of digital goods and of consumer piracy on society. Theoretical results and empirical facts are put together in order to challenge the standard assertion that publicness and free-riding necessarily lead to a lack of innovation or production of new digital