IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/idt/journl/cs7101.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Understanding the Challenges of the Digital Economy: The Nature of Digital Goods

Author

Listed:
  • Thierry RAYNA

    (Imperial College London)

Abstract

This article investigates the economic nature and characteristics of digital goods. Such goods are, due to their replicability, shown to be public goods (albeit in an evolutionary way) and durable goods. Furthermore, the content of such goods, combined with their durability, makes them experience goods. While only one of these characteristics would be sufficient to create difficulties for producers and lead to market failure, this article demonstrates that each of the characteristics reinforces the other. The framework presented in the article is then applied to two important issues: the new trend of massive consumer piracy and the overall problem of value of digital goods

Suggested Citation

  • Thierry RAYNA, 2008. "Understanding the Challenges of the Digital Economy: The Nature of Digital Goods," Communications & Strategies, IDATE, Com&Strat dept., vol. 1(71), pages 13-36, 3rd quart.
    • Handle: RePEc:idt:journl:cs7101
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://repec.idate.org/RePEc/idt/journl/CS7101/CS71_RAYNA.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Thierry RAYNA & Ludmila STRIUKOVA, 2008. "White Knight or Trojan Horse? The Consequences of Digital Rights Management for Consumers, Firms and Society," Communications & Strategies, IDATE, Com&Strat dept., vol. 1(69), pages 109-126, 1st quart.
    2. Thierry Rayna, 2006. "IPR Protection in the High-Tech Industries: A Model of Piracy," Bristol Economics Discussion Papers 06/593, School of Economics, University of Bristol, UK.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jing Lan & Yuge Ma & Dajian Zhu & Diana Mangalagiu & Thomas F. Thornton, 2017. "Enabling Value Co-Creation in the Sharing Economy: The Case of Mobike," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 9(9), pages 1-20, August.
    2. Thierry Rayna & Ludmila Striukova, 2021. "Involving Consumers: The Role of Digital Technologies in Promoting ‘Prosumption’ and User Innovation," Journal of the Knowledge Economy, Springer;Portland International Center for Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET), vol. 12(1), pages 218-237, March.
    3. Devesa Fernández, María & Herrero Prieto, Luis César & Sanz Lara, José Ángel, 2009. "Análisis económico de la demanda de un festival cultural/," Estudios de Economia Aplicada, Estudios de Economia Aplicada, vol. 27, pages 139-160, Abril.
    4. Acar, Kemal Veli, 2017. "Child abuse materials as digital goods: Why we should fear new commercial forms," Economics Discussion Papers 2017-15, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel).
    5. Li, Sen & Chen, Yan, 2023. "How nonfungible tokens empower business model innovation," Business Horizons, Elsevier, vol. 66(4), pages 543-554.
    6. Marcin Wieczerzycki, 2015. "Produkt cyfrowy w świetle jakościowej teorii informacji i koncepcji hylemorfizmu," Gospodarka Narodowa. The Polish Journal of Economics, Warsaw School of Economics, issue 1, pages 129-146.
    7. Kim, Jongbum & Seo, Jeonghun, 2017. "User Resistance to Digital Goods: a Case of E-books," 14th ITS Asia-Pacific Regional Conference, Kyoto 2017: Mapping ICT into Transformation for the Next Information Society 168502, International Telecommunications Society (ITS).
    8. Ran Xu & Yeong-Gil Kim & Chenglei Liang, 2024. "The Effect of Digitization on Economic Sustainable Growth in Shandong Province of China," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 16(16), pages 1-21, August.
    9. Rayna, Thierry & Striukova, Ludmila, 2016. "From rapid prototyping to home fabrication: How 3D printing is changing business model innovation," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 102(C), pages 214-224.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Rajeev K. Goel & Michael A. Nelson, 2012. "Shadow economy and international software piracy," Applied Financial Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 22(23), pages 1951-1959, December.
    2. Kim, Jin-Hyuk & Leung, Tin Cheuk, 2021. "Eliminating digital rights management from the E-book market," Information Economics and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 57(C).
    3. Rajeev Goel & Michael Nelson, 2009. "Determinants of software piracy: economics, institutions, and technology," The Journal of Technology Transfer, Springer, vol. 34(6), pages 637-658, December.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:idt:journl:cs7101. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: BLAVIER Thomas (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/idatefr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.