On the Impact of Piracy on Innovation in the Presence of Technological and Market Uncertainty

This paper analyses the effect of piracy on innovation in the presence of R&D competition with technological and market uncertainty. With a single innovating firm facing technological uncertainty, piracy unambiguously retards innovation. However, with R&D competition where firms face market and technological uncertainties, we show that piracy may enhance overall innovation. We also show that if the difference between the probabilities of success of the innovating firms is relatively large then piracy enhances the R&D investment and profit of the less efficient firm.Innovation, market uncertainty, R&D race, technological uncertainty

Welfare v. Consent: On the Optimal Penalty for Harassment

The economic approach to determine optimal legal policies involves maximizing a social welfare function. We propose an alternative: a consent-approach that seeks to promote consensual interactions and deter non-consensual interactions. The consent-approach does not rest upon inter-personal utility comparisons or value judgments about preferences. It does not require any additional information relative to the welfare-approach. We highlight the contrast between the welfare-approach and the consent-approach using a stylized model inspired by seminal cases of harassment and the #MeToo movement. The social welfare maximizing penalty for harassment in our model can be zero under the welfare-approach but not under the consent-approach.Comment: 38 pages, 3 figure

On the sufficiency of regulatory enforcement in combating piracy

Accommodating strategy, Aggressive strategy, Anti-copying investment, Regulatory enforcement, K42, L11,

Innovation and copyright infringement: The Case of Commercial Piracy and End-user Piracy

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the question, whether copyright infringement of digital products like software commonly labelled as piracy impedes innovation. We find the answer depends on the nature of piracy i.e. whether it is end-users or commercial piracy. For end user piracy, copyright infringement does not necessarily impede innovation; in fact it can be shown that it encourages innovation when the pirates are active. However, for commercial piracy, it always impedes innovation which has negative implications on the overall welfare of the society. We show under what conditions the government intervention through IPR protection strategy (like monitoring and imposing a fine to the pirate) can support the copyright holder for higher level of innovation. We find the socially optimally monitoring rate for the government that result in maximum innovation for the copyright holde

Temporary-Snapshot Based Composite Synchronous Checkpointing Protocol for Mobile Distributed Systems

Minimum-process synchronous snapshot compilation is a suitable approach to introduce fault tolerance in mobile distributed systems transparently. In order to balance the snapshot compilation overhead and the loss of computation on recovery, we propose a composite snapshot compilation algorithm, wherein an all-process synchronous snapshot is capturen after the execution of minimum-process synchronous snapshot compilation algorithm for a fixed number of times. In synchronous snapshot compilation, if a single procedure fails to capture its snapshot; all the snapshot compilation effort goes waste, because, each process has to repudiate its tentative snapshot. In order to capture the tentative snapshot, an Mobile Host(M_HOST) needs to transfer large snapshot data to its local Mobile Support Station(MOB_SUPP_ST) over wireless channels. Hence, the loss of snapshot compilation effort may be exceedingly high. Therefore, we propose that in the first phase, all concerned M_HOSTs will capture Temporary snapshot only. Temporary snapshot is similar to mutable snapshot, which is stored on the memory of M_HOST only. In this case, if some procedure fails to capture snapshot in the first phase, then M_HOSTs need to repudiate their Temporary snapshots only. The effort of capturing a Temporary snapshot is negligibly small as compared to the tentative one.In the minimum-process synchronous snapshot compilation algorithm, an effort has been made to minimize the number of useless snapshots and blocking of procedures using probabilistic approach

Copyright Infringement, Product Quality and Producer's Profit

This paper uses a strategic entry-deterrence framework to study the relationship between copying cost, and a monopolists profit and product quality. The potential entrant is a fake-producer producing and selling identical copies of the monopolists product. The monopolists subgame perfect equilibrium quality and profit is either unaffected or positively affected by changes in the copying cost. Tariffs on copying devices may be an effective copyright right protection instrument. Though an increase in tariff increases the product quality and monopolists profit, its welfare effects are ambiguous.

The impact of piracy on innovation in the presence of technological and market uncertainty

With a single innovating firm facing only technological uncertainty, piracy unambiguously retards innovation. However, with R&D competition where firms face both market and technological uncertainties, we show that if the two firms differ "significantly" with respect to the efficiency in R&D investment, then piracy increases the R&D investment of the less efficient firm and reduces that of the more efficient firm. In this case piracy enhances the overall probability of a successful innovation.Innovation Market uncertainty R& D race Technological uncertainty