What influences rampant movie piracy?

This study develops a model of consumer complicity with counterfeit and pirated movies to better understand what motivates this type of illicit consumer behavior; specifically whether personal values (idealism, relativism), ethical concern, collectivism, hedonic shopping experience, and perceived quality are plausible predictors of this illicit consumption behavior. We selected movies as the product to examine since the industry has a high incidence of lost sales due to counterfeits in physical markets (e.g., DVDs) and piracy by way of digital formats (e.g., illegal downloading and/or video streaming). Using a web-based survey, over 1,500 consumers from Brazil, China, India, Russia, and the U.S. support the model and provide a means to identify a complicit consumer across country markets. The consumers’ lack of ethical concern and the favorable hedonic shopping experience in both physical and virtual markets are the strongest predictors of consumer complicity to obtain illicit movies. Implications for managers are to discourage complicity through demarketing campaigns that defray the hedonic shopping stimulus, foster a credible ethical concern, and create a negative association of inferior quality towards the fake movies.