A Preference for Recent Movies? An Experimental Study of a Motivation For Pirating

The success of streaming services seemed to mark the end of the two-decade-long debate about online piracy. However, the emergence of new websites aggregating and distributing illegally content from multiple streaming platforms rekindled the debate. In this paper, we are interested in understanding why consumers still resort to piracy. The literature suggests that having access to goods that are not available in legal channels could be a reason to resort piracy. In the movie industry, for example, films are launched at different points in time in different channels, either due to public policy or to private contracts (e.g., between production and distribution companies). Supporters of this argument propose the reduction of the so-called "release window" to fight illegal consumption of online content. In this paper, we test this argument using a revealed-preference experiment in the laboratory with real-consumption of a movie.Subjects choose between two catalogs of movies with different release windows, and consume, in the lab, one movie according to their choice. Choosing more recent movies may entail financial punishment. Our results suggest that, absent other dimensions such as popularity and promotion, subjects are not significantly motivated by the fact that a movie catalog is recent when they decide to resort piracy, even among the more avid movie consumers. Furthermore, the mere reduction in the release window does not seem to impact the likelihood of an individual to resort to piracy. We discuss the implications for policymakers and managers