Most incentive schemes for peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing are rate-based, only giving consideration to upload rate when measuring contributions. Besides giving room for strategic peers to benefit from concealing high value chunks, rate-based metrics also aggravate overpayment. Overpayment is a phenomenon that one pays a higher than necessary price for goods. In a P2P system, overpayment exists...

During the silent era, movie producers rented the vast majority of their films to exhibitors for flat per-day fees, but a technology “shock” in the form of the coming of sound led to the widespread replacement of flat fees by revenuesharing. This paper seeks to determine why. It finds that sound technology altered the structure of incentives in movie exhibition, reducing the role of the exhibit...

This study investigates self-reported practices and values of Internet-based cultural consumption in relation to illegal file sharing in Sweden during 2007-2012. It is based on more than 1.000 posts in an Internet discussion forum and focuses on expressed senses of guilt, whether file sharing is right or wrong, buying media, and dimensions of stakeholders and media genres. This note presents wo...

This paper endogenizes bidders’ beliefs about their competition in a symmetric first-price auction with independent private values, by allowing bidders to decide whether to participate publicly or secretly. When public participation is more costly, bidders only participate secretly in the unique equilibrium. By contrast, when secret participation is slightly more costly, all symmetric equilibri...

In this paper, we analyze cost sharing problems arising from a general service by explicitly taking into account the generated revenues. To this cost-revenue sharing problem, we associate a cooperative game with transferable utility, called cost-revenue game. By considering cooperation among the agents using the general service, the value of a coalition is defined as the maximum net profit that...

A growing empirical literature examines the relationship between music file sharing and legal purchases of music, but existing studies examine the period before consumers had attractive legal digital a la carte options. The iTunes Music Store has grown quickly since its appearance in 2003, and digital music now accounts for a third of US recorded music sales. Using a new survey of University of...

In this paper the question is addressed asking, “Is Timeshare Ownership an Investment Product?” After some discussion, the conclusion is that the purchaser outlays funds for economic benefit, thus timeshare fits well within the definition of an investment product. The paper also adds to the literature in that it advances the discussion regarding the risks associated with timeshare and the metho...

People often interact repeatedly: with relatives, through file sharing, in politics, etc. Many such interactions are reciprocal: reacting to the actions of the other. In order to facilitate decisions regarding reciprocal interactions, we analyze the development of reciprocation over time. To this end, we propose a model for such interactions that is simple enough to enable formal analysis, but ...

Recently, public bicycle sharing system (PBSS) has become one of the most favorite urban transportation systems that can help governments to decrease environmental problems such as pollution and traffic. This paper studies a sharing system that includes two types of stations. The first category contains stations that users can rent or return back bicycles and each bicycle can be rented by any n...

Information goods such as books, journals, computer software, music and videos can be copied, shared, resold, or rented. When such opportunities for sharing are present, the content producer will generally sell a smaller amount at a higher price which may increase or decrease pro¢ts. I identify three circumstances where pro¢ts increase: (1) when the transactions cost of sharing is less than the...