The role of education and enforcement in ensuring compliance with a law or policy has been debated for more than a century now. We reopen this debate in the context of security circumvention by employees, currently a leading cause of information security and privacy breaches. Drawing upon prior...

That versioning can be effective for information goods is well known. In particular, related literature shows that, when consumers underestimate a product, it is often better for the manufacturer to offer a base version of the product along with the fully-featured version. This is because the...

The issue of versioning of information goods has resurfaced, in part as a result of the recent popularity of downloadable contents (DLC) among video game manufacturers. The central idea behind the DLC strategy, zero-day DLCs in particular, is that consumers who find the base version of a game to...

The usefulness of a software product becomes obvious to consumers only after they get to experience it and, upon experiencing it, they may reach different conclusions regarding its true value. We examine the problem of designing free software trials under a general learning function. Our...

This research develops a micro-economic model to study the impact of support forums on the software industry. Motivated by the rapid growth of forums such as Stack Exchange, Quora, and Yahoo! Answers, we examine what impact they could have on a software vendor. Since these forums provide an...