Piracy is a significant source of concern facing software developers, music labels, and movie production companies, to name a few. Digital goods producers and government entities argue that there are victims of piracy, whereas pirates may perceive their actions to be victimless. Regarding implications of our research, we extend the theory of planned behavior (TPB) by theorizing that attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control could influence perceptions of moral obligations as a consequence of the desire to rationalize unethical behavior. Unlike prior literature, we manipulate the rationalization of moral obligations due to the victimless view towards piracy, and show how moral obligations become important determinants of piracy behavior. Accordingly, our demonstrated malleability of morals may be an important path through which individuals are able to continue past behaviors. We also conduct a second study to identify the effect of implementing an educational message from a fictitious software company to exogenously nudge the pirate and influence the impact of perceived moral obligations on intentions to pirate. Our results show that the introduction of an exogenous educational message is an effective piracy mitigation strategy.

The objective of our paper is to determine the effect of piracy advice from various sources on music consumer behavior. Specifically, does it matter if the source of advice has a stake in the outcome of the piracy decision? Does it matter if the source of advice has a social tie with the advisee? Accordingly, we conduct a lab experiment using teenagers and their parents as subjects, increasing the realism of the context by sampling potential pirates and their parents. Treatments represent various sources of piracy advice (e.g., the teen's parent, a record label, or an external regulator). Subjects make decisions playing our new experimental game -The Piracy Game -extended from the volunteer's dilemma literature. Interestingly, subjects respond negatively to advice from record labels over time, purchasing fewer songs as compared to other sources such as the subject's parent. The existence of a social tie between the advisor and the subject assists in mitigating piracy, especially when a parent is facing potential penalties due to his/her child's behavior. An external regulator, having no social tie or stake in the decision, provides the least credible source of advice, leading to the greatest amount of piracy. Our analyses not only provide managerial insights but also develop theoretical understanding of the role of social ties in the context of advice.

We investigate changes to the value individuals place on the online disclosure of their private information in the presence of multiple privacy factors. We use an incentive compatible mechanism to capture individuals' willingness-to-accept (WTA) for a privacy disclosure in a series of three randomized experiments. Each experiment manipulates characteristics of a required privacy disclosure by altering the information context, intended secondary use of the disclosed private information, and the requirement to disclose personally identifying information. We collect data from two populations (college students and Amazon Mechanical Turk workers) to aid with generalizability of our results. As methodological checks to rule out lack of awareness in the participants, we first increase the saliency of the privacy disclosure characteristics in the second experiment and then require participants to watch a video on the potential consequences of disclosing private information in the third experiment. Across the three experiments, we consistently observe null effects for each of the privacy factors with the exception of two population dependent exceptions in the second study. Our participants do acknowledge the increased risk introduced by the experimental factors and the increased saliency and awareness do lead to higher privacy valuations on average. However, there is no consistent manifestation as significant main effects for the three privacy factors. This is in contrast to prior research, which has found significant effects for each of these factors when studied separately. The results provide a unique perspective on privacy valuations by demonstrating that results from prior research on simple privacy decisions may not translate to more realistic, complex privacy disclosure decisions that involve multiple factors.

There are many contexts where an "everybody else is doing it" attitude is relevant. We evaluate the impact of this attitude in a multi-threshold public goods game. We use a lab experiment to study the role of providing information about contribution behavior to targeted subsets of individuals, and its effect on coordination. Treatments include one in which no information is provided and three others that vary in whom we provide information to: a random sample of subjects; those whose contributions are below the average of their group, and those whose contributions are above the average of their group. We find that the random provision of information is no different than not providing information at all. More importantly, average contributions improve with targeted treatments. Coordination waste is also lower with targeted treatments. The insights from this research are relevant more broadly to contexts including piracy, open innovation, and crowdfunding.

There are many contexts where an "everybody else is doing it" attitude is relevant. We evaluate the impact of this attitude in a multi-threshold public goods game. We use a lab experiment to study the role of providing information about contribution behavior to targeted subsets of individuals, and its effect on coordination. Treatments include one in which no information is provided and three others that vary in whom we provide information to: a random sample of subjects; those whose contributions are below the average of their group, and those whose contributions are above the average of their group. We find that the random provision of information is no different than not providing information at all. More importantly, average contributions improve with targeted treatments. Coordination waste is also lower with targeted treatments. The insights from this research are relevant more broadly to contexts including piracy, open innovation, and crowdfunding.