File sharing as conditional cooperation: evidence from a framed field experiment

ABSTRACT

In this project, we investigate downloading and sharing behaviour in a novel ‘piracy game’ modelled after standard public good games. We find that willingness to share correlates positively with the sharing by others. By contrast, actual behaviour in the ‘piracy game’ is not correlated with self-reported behaviour.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital piracy
• public goods
• laboratory experiment
• file-sharing
• reciprocity

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C92
• D63
• Z1

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Marta Dyrkacz and Katarzyna Pfeifer for their help with the experiment set-up. Anna Kukla-Gryz and the participants of the GRAPE seminar provided valuable feedback. All errors are ours.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

¹ E.g. Selwyn (2008); Morris and Higgins (2008); Wingrove, Korpas and Weisz (2011).

² Studies with children include Harbaugh and Krause (2000); Alencar, Deoliveirasiqueira and Yamamoto (2008); overall, little is known on how public good games generalize to other reward domains.

³ Their design was modified to capture differences between deliberate and instinctive choices, following Dyrkacz and Krawczyk (2015).

⁴ We gave subjects some examples of the most popular websites within each category.

⁵ See online Appendix for details of the procedure.

Additional information

Funding

The financial support from the National Science Centre under grant number: [UMO-2011/01/D/HS4/03937] is gratefully acknowledged.