Submission + - Liebowitz critique of Strumpf Paper on Filesharing (ssrn.com)
chevman writes: "Found a very interesting new study by Stan Liebowitz on the effects of file sharing on the music/movie industry.
It addresses a 2004 paper by Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf that was originally covered in this article from Slashdot:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/30/1537232 (MP3 Sharing Not Serious Threat To CD Sales)
New study disputes some of the claims made in the original study on file sharing:
"In the following pages I attempt replications of their quasi experiments and conclude that contrary to their claims, none of their quasi experiment supports a conclusion that file-sharing has a benign impact on record sales.
Second, O/S provide factual details about the industry that appear to be consistent with their overall conclusion. Surprisingly, these 'facts' were almost never supported by reference to actual data. My attempts to verify many of these factual claims indicate that these O/S statements appear to be at variance with actual data.
A reader of the O/S paper will search in vain for documentation of many of their factual assertions or of details of how they constructed their quasi-experiments. The lack of documentation, both for the facts reported and for the construction of the quasi experiments, is one reason that the material below is so lengthy.
The analysis below should be of interest to anyone interested in the impact of file-sharing. I have tried to make this material accessible to non-economists."
Full paper can be downloaded from:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1014399"
It addresses a 2004 paper by Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf that was originally covered in this article from Slashdot:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/30/1537232 (MP3 Sharing Not Serious Threat To CD Sales)
New study disputes some of the claims made in the original study on file sharing:
"In the following pages I attempt replications of their quasi experiments and conclude that contrary to their claims, none of their quasi experiment supports a conclusion that file-sharing has a benign impact on record sales.
Second, O/S provide factual details about the industry that appear to be consistent with their overall conclusion. Surprisingly, these 'facts' were almost never supported by reference to actual data. My attempts to verify many of these factual claims indicate that these O/S statements appear to be at variance with actual data.
A reader of the O/S paper will search in vain for documentation of many of their factual assertions or of details of how they constructed their quasi-experiments. The lack of documentation, both for the facts reported and for the construction of the quasi experiments, is one reason that the material below is so lengthy.
The analysis below should be of interest to anyone interested in the impact of file-sharing. I have tried to make this material accessible to non-economists."
Full paper can be downloaded from:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1014399"
