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This paper studies the impact of software piracy on prominent and non-prominent software developers in markets based on a two-sided platform business. User behavior is imperfect and, when adopting a platform, users only take prominent software into account. We show that prominent software exhibits higher piracy rates than non-prominent software. However, contrary to intuition, this does not necessarily mean that prominent software developers benefit more from increased software protection. Indeed, we show that prominent developers may lose out whereas non-prominent developers may gain from better software protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper studies the impact of software piracy in a two-sided-market setting. Software platforms attract developers and users to maximize their profits. The equilibrium price structure is affected by piracy: license fees to developers are higher with more software protection but the impact on user prices is ambiguous. A conflict between platforms and software developers over software protection may arise: whereas one side benefits from better protection, the other party loses out. Under platform compatibility, this conflict is no longer present. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]