We all do it, but are we willing to admit? Incentivizing digital pirates’ confessions

Abstract

In this study, we try to assess the prevalence of illicit downloading in the market of audio books and the willingness to admit to such practices. We compare the Bayesian Truth Serum (Prelec, 2004) treatment in which truthful responses and precise estimates are rewarded to the control treatment with a flat participation fee. We find a sizable treatment effect – incentivized ‘pirates’ admit approximately 60% more often than the nonincentivized ones.

Keywords:

• illegal download
• digital piracy
• Bayesian Truth Serum
• wages

JEL Classification:

• A13
• C93
• D12

Notes

¹ See Zhao and Keane (2013) for China, Siwek (2007) for the USA, or Cox et al. (2010) for Finland, to name just a few examples.

² Ford and Richardson (1994) provide an overview of experimental evidence linking ethical judgement to decision-making in a more general context. Literature related directly to online intellectual property rights infringement is discussed, for example, in Peace et al. (2003); Cox et al. (2010) and Oh and Teo (2010).

³ Jurca and Faltings (2011) discuss various cases of eliciting the true distribution. Barrage and Lee (2010) discuss in detail the advantages of BTS, when compared to other methods of eliciting behaviour.

⁴ In addition to questionable research practices, the BTS has been utilized in studies of optimal incentives for inexpert human raters (Shaw et al., 2011), informing policy (Weiss, 2009), questionable research practices in social sciences (John et al., 2012) as well as ex ante analyses of new drug adoption (Howie et al., 2011).

⁵ The platform offers the subscribers the opportunity to contribute to creating a certain audio book prior to its distribution. Subscribers contribute to the creation of an audio book by conditionally purchasing it ex ante. The value of the contributions may exceed the final market price of this audio book as announced at the moment of fund raising. Contributors who pay more may choose to receive an audio book with additional attributes (e.g. a personalized dedication to the contributor by the actors reading the audio book). All productions by Fonopolis Ltd. are new audio books, i.e., concern creating an audio version of the book that existed only in print.

⁶ This is the most popular file-sharing service in Poland, according to traffic use statistics.

⁷ The invitations to participate in the survey were sent out on 17 December 2013. Those who had not answered by then received a reminder on 6 January 2014. Data collection lasted for two more weeks from this reminder.

⁸ The difference in response rate between the treatment and control group is not statistically significant. The response rate was slightly lower among noncontributors than among contributors (22.5% versus 30.9%, p < .01.)

⁹ This was to be expected – there is nothing inherently shameful about reporting beliefs concerning others’ behaviour.