Duke University and the Department of Justice recently published an article titled "The Determinants of Music Piracy in a Sample of College Students." In this paper they survey a group of college students at a Southern University to determine their willingness to purchase music (WTP), at what price they would be willing to purchase music, and also determined each student's morality using a five-question proxy measure developed by Legno et al. (1998) In this survey they used the same song for all college students, "Right Round" by Flo Rida, which was the number one song on iTunes at the time the survey was conducted. (Bellemare & Holmburg, 2009, p. 3) The price they were asked if they were willing to pay was equal to the last two digits of their Social Security number (SSN). On average, the observed WTP was approximately $0.68. (Bellemare & Holmburg, 2009, p. 3) They determined that lowering the price of songs on iTunes to the average WTP level would significantly decrease piracy. In many ways the investigation conducted by Duke University and the Department of Justice is flawed. The handsome author...
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