Digital Rights Strategies in a Virtual World Marketplace

This paper adopts the Heckman two-step model to analyze the impact of copyright strategy on sales performance of digital product, using the panel data comes from online virtual goods transaction website Xstreet.com. The results show that (1) significant relationship exists between sales performance and copyright strategy of digital product, but the influence of each copyright strategy on sales performance are different; (2) A seller’s copyright structure within same product line can also affect sales performance of a digital product, thus in order to optimize the copyright combinations, a seller should fully consider the copyright strategy within the whole product line.

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