Ryan Lampe

Network externalities, price discrimination and profitable piracy

Abstract Recent papers have argued that a monopoly firm might be able to maximize its profit by allowing some customers to steal its product. In particular, with network externalities, it is claimed that allowing piracy can be profitable because it increases the user base of the product and raises the willingness-to-pay of other customers. In this paper we analyze these claims when the producer can freely choose the degree of piracy prevention. We consider profit maximizing equilibria and show that allowing piracy cannot raise profits if the monopoly producer can directly price discriminate between potential-pirates and other customers. In the absence of price discrimination, allowing piracy will only maximize profits when the ability to pirate is inversely related to customer willingness-to-pay. Even in this situation, there is no profit maximizing equilibrium where some potential pirates buy while others pirate the product. Thus, even though potential pirates differ in their ability to illegally gain the product, the profit maximizing outcome involves either no piracy or complete piracy.

Patent Renewal Fees and Self-Funding Patent Offices

A socially optimal structure of application and renewal fees for patents would encourage the maximal number of applications while reducing effective patent length. We find, however, that when patent offices are required to be self-funding, resource constraints can distort this fee structure. Specifically, a financially constrained, but welfare-oriented, patent office will tend to raise initial application fees while lowering renewal fees. This creates two detriments to social welfare as it discourages the filing of some patents while extending the effective life of others.

Patent Pools and Innovation in Substitutes - Evidence from the 19th Century Sewing Machine Industry

Patent pools, which combine complementary patents of competing firms, are expected to increase overall welfare – but potentially discourage innovation in substitutes for the pool technology. This paper exploits a new historical data set on changes in patenting and firm entry for a clearly defined pool technology and substitutes in the 19th century sewing machine industry to investigate the effects of a pool on innovation in substitutes. This analysis reveals a substantial increase in innovation for an – albeit technologically inferior – substitute technology. Historical evidence suggests that the creation of a pool diverted innovation towards an inferior substitute by creating differential license fees and litigation risks, which made it more difficult for outside firms to compete directly with the pool technology.

The Adoption of New Technologies: Understanding Hollywood's (Slow and Uneven) Conversion to Color

Hollywood converted to sound in three years. In comparison, Hollywoods conversion to color required more than three decades, and included a three-year period in which the share of color movies declined from 58 to 31percent. We investigate this puzzling adoption profile using detailed data on 7,022 movies between 1940 and 1959. These data indicate differences in studio size and complementarity between genre and color impeded the rapid diffusion of color. These data also indicate that disadoption followed weak returns to a wave of color releases that were encouraged by the introductionof a low-cost color process.

Self-Regulation vs State Regulation: Evidence from Cinema Age Restrictions

his paper studies the effect of self-regulation on the leniency of cinema age restrictions using cross-country variation in the classifications applied to 1,922 movies released in 31 countries between 2002 and 2011. Our data show that restrictive classifications reduce box office revenues, particularly for movies with wide box office appeal. These data also show that self-regulated ratings agencies display greater leniency than state-regulated agencies when classifying movies with wide appeal. However, consistent with theoretical models of self-regulation, the degree of leniency is small because it is not costly for governments to intervene and regulate ratings themselves.