Managing Piracy: Pricing and Sampling Strategies for Digital Experience Goods in Vertically Segmented Markets
Managing Piracy: Pricing and Sampling Strategies for Digital Experience Goods in Vertically Segmented Markets
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DOI：
10.2139/ssrn.422100
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发表时间：
2003-04
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
R. Chellappa;S. Shivendu
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
R. Chellappa;S. Shivendu
数字产品适合版本化，但也会受到盗版损失的影响。本文建立了细分市场中数字体验商品的定价模型，并探讨了抽样作为一种防盗版策略的最优性。消费者只有在消费后才会意识到符合他们品味的体验的真正契合度，而且由于盗版提供了额外的(尽管是非法的)消费机会，需要重新审视经济学的传统细分结论和营销的抽样建议。我们建立了一个两阶段盗版模型，在这个市场中，消费者对质量和道德成本的边际估值是不同的。在我们的模型中，一些消费者在第一阶段盗版产品，允许他们更新他们的适合度感知，这可能导致在第二阶段重新评估他们的购买/盗版决策。我们建议对低估和高估的产品采取不同的定价和抽样策略，并建议通过产品抽样将盗版的任何潜在好处内化。两个违反直觉的结果尤为突出。首先，与市场上被低估的产品相比，盗版损失更严重的是那些与其炒作不符的产品，因此需要对前者进行更大的威慑投资；其次，与实物商品不同，在实物商品中，抽样总是有利于被低估的产品，而数字商品的抽样只有在狭义的情况下才是最佳的，因为盗版和细分都造成了价格边界。
Digital goods lend themselves to versioning but also suffer from piracy losses. This paper develops a pricing model for digital experience goods in a segmented market and explores the optimality of sampling as a piracy-mitigating strategy. Consumers are aware of the true fit of an experience good to their tastes only after consumption, and as piracy offers an additional (albeit illegal) consumption opportunity, traditional segmentation findings from economics and sampling recommendations from marketing, need to be revisited. We develop a two-stage model of piracy for a market where consumers are heterogeneous in their marginal valuation for quality and their moral costs. In our model, some consumers pirate the product in the first stage allowing them to update their fit-perception that may result in re-evaluation of their buying/pirating decision in the second stage. We recommend distinct pricing and sampling strategies for underestimated and overestimated products and suggest that any potential benefits of piracy can be internalized through product sampling. Two counterintuitive results stand out. First, piracy losses are more severe for products that do not live up to their hype rather than for those that have been undervalued in the market, thus requiring a greater deterrence investment for the former, and second, unlike physical goods where sampling is always beneficial for underestimated products, sampling for digital goods is optimal only under narrowly defined circumstances due to the price boundaries created by both piracy and segmentation.