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Abstract:
Music industry is "facing the music" now. Big stakeholders try very hard to maintain their positions while other players see opportunities in the advent of peer-to-peer networks. Music, as a kind of representative information good, deserves its economic properties to be examined and made explicit. This paper reviews various aspects of the literature covering information goods, tries to extend the analysis to the distribution of music and points out possible venues to follow in order to look for a solution.

Music, Information Good, Distribution, Peer-to-peer, Copyright

Abstract:
Despite the widespread popularity of online opinion forums among consumers, the business value that such systems bring to organizations has, so far, remained an unanswered question. This paper addresses this question by studying the value of online movie ratings in forecasting motion picture revenues. First, we conduct a survey where a nationally representative sample of subjects who do not rate movies online is asked to rate a number of recent movies. Their ratings exhibit high correlation with online ratings for the same movies. We, thus, provide evidence for the claim that online ratings can be considered as a useful proxy for word-of-mouth about movies. Inspired by the Bass model of product diffusion, we then develop a motion picture revenue-forecasting model that incorporates the impact of both publicity and word of mouth on a movie's revenue trajectory. Using our model, we derive notably accurate predictions of a movie's total revenues from statistics of user reviews posted on Yahoo! Movies during the first week of a new movie's release. The results of our work provide encouraging evidence for the value of publicly available online forum information to firms for real-time forecasting and competitive analysis.

Online reviews, motion pictures, revenue forecasting, diffusion models

Abstract:
The literature on the private provision of public goods suggests an inverse relationship between incentives to contribute and group size. We find, however, that after an exogenous reduction of group size at Chinese Wikipedia, the unaffected contributors decrease their contributions by 41.4% on average. We attribute the cause to social effects: Contributors receive social benefits that increase with both the amount of their contributions and group size, and the shrinking group size weakens these social benefits. Consistent with our explanation, we find that the more contributors value social benefits, the more they reduce their contributions after the block.

incentives to contribute, group size, public goods, social effects, Wikipedia, Internet censorship