This article reviews recent theoretical contributions on digital piracy. It starts by elaborating on the reasons for intellectual property protection, by reporting a few facts about copyright protection, and by examining reasons to become a digital pirate. Next, it provides an exploration of the...

The rise and success of digital platforms (such as Airbnb, Amazon, Booking, Expedia, Ebay, and Uber) rely, to a large extent, on their ability to address two major issues. First, to effectively facilitate transactions, platforms need to resolve the problem of trust in the implicit or explicit...

This article reviews recent theoretical contributions on digital piracy. It starts by elaborating on the reasons for intellectual property protection, by reporting a few facts about copyright protection, and by examining reasons to become a digital pirate. Next, it provides an exploration of the...

This article reviews recent theoretical contributions on digital piracy. It starts by elaborating on the reasons for intellectual property protection, by reporting a few facts about copyright protection, and by examining reasons to become a digital pirate. Next, it provides an exploration of the...

In many markets, user benefits depend on participation and usage decisions of other users giving rise to network effects. Intermediaries manage these network effects and thus act as platforms that bring users together. This paper reviews key findings from the literature on network effects and...

The effects of (private, small-scale) piracy on the pricing behavior of producers of information goods are studied within a unified model of vertical differentiation. Although information goods are assumed to be perfectly horizontally differentiated, demands are interdependent because the...

We consider the effects of taxes for competing two-sided platforms. We first detail how a platform passes a tax increase on its prices. Adding price competition, we study next how the tax affects profits. Because of the strategic implications of the cross-side external effects, the tax increase...

Competition between two-sided platforms is shaped by the possibility of multihoming. If users on both sides singlehome, each platform provides users on either side exclusive access to its users on the other side. In contrast, if users on one side can multihome, platforms exert monopoly power on...

The effects of (private, small-scale) copying on the pricing behavior of producers of information goods are studied within a unified model à la Mussa-Rosen (1978). When the copying technology involves a marginal cost and no fixed cost, producers act independently. In this simple framework, we...