tailieunhanh - SHARED INFORMATION GOODS

The presence of nontraded goods in our model increases the relative volatility of nominal and real exchange rates relative to the volatility in the model without nontraded goods. An important aspect of the behavior of exchange rates in our model with nontraded goods hinges on the agent's inability to optimally share the risk associated with country-speci¯c shocks to productivity in the nontraded goods sector. In response to a (persistent) positive shock to productivity in this sector, agents wish to consume and invest more. However, higher consumption and investment of tradable goods requires the use (in ¯xed proportions) of both traded intermediate inputs and nontraded inputs. . | Shared Information Goods Yannis Bakos Erik Brynjolfsson Douglas Lichtman New York University MIT Stanford University MIT University of Chicago bakos@ erikb@ dgl@ Abstract Once purchased information goods are often shared among groups of consumers. Computer software for example can be duplicated and passed from one user to the next. Journal articles can be copied. Music can be dubbed. In this paper we ask whether these various forms of sharing undermine seller profit. We compare profitability under the assumption that information goods are used only by their direct purchasers with profitability under the more realistic assumption that information goods are sometimes shared within small social communities. We reach several surprising conclusions. We find for example that under certain circumstances sharing will markedly increase profit even if sharing is inefficient in the sense that it is more expensive for consumers to distribute the good via sharing that it would be for the producer to simply produce additional units. Conversely we find that sharing can markedly decrease profit even where sharing reduces net distribution costs. These results contrast with much of the prior literature on small-scale sharing but are consistent with results obtained in related work on the topic of commodity bundling. For helpful comments on this and earlier drafts we owe special thanks to Douglas Baird Emily Buss Rebecca Eisenberg Jack Goldsmith Kevin Kordana William Landes Mark Lemley Larry Lessig Ronald Mann Robert Merges Randy Picker Eric Posner Richard Posner and Hal Varian. Hung-Ken Chien provided outstanding research assistance. SHARED INFORMATION GOODS August 1998 Page 1 I. Introduction In an influential article published a decade ago 1 Stan Besen and Sheila Kirby investigated the economic effects of small-scale decentralized reproduction of intellectual property -- the types of information sharing that take place every time a consumer pirates a .