The availability of digital distribution channels raises many new challenges for managers in the media industries. This is particularly true for movie studios where content can be stolen and released through illegitimate digital distribution channels before, or shortly after, the legitimate release date. In response to this potential threat, movie studios have spent millions of dollars attempting to protect their content from unauthorized release, to prosecute those who might distribute or consume pirated content, and to lobby governments to strengthen anti-piracy laws. However, there has been very little rigorous research to analyze whether, and how much, movie piracy cannibalizes legitimate box-office sales. In this paper, we analyze this question in the context of post-release movie piracy. We also consider whether going to the movies is substitutable by watching a pirated version at home. Even though there is a lag between the release in cinema-theaters and a DVD-release (that is when a pirated copy of a good quality is made available), we consider making decision at the certain moment, so time lag does not make any difference. Our study contributes to the growing literature on piracy and digital media consumption in the online community by presenting evidence of the impact of digital piracy, by differentiating the effect of post-release movie piracy from the other types of piracy that the extant literature has previously considered.

Real estate housing market in former USSR was highly regulated and standardized in terms of product offering. Transition economy slightly changes this situation – consumers start to demand the new quality of housing while developers begin to implement the advanced building technologies and change the product attributes. The structure of consumers’ preferences forms product utility, which could be measured by using decompositional methods. We implement hierarchical information integration approach that let us represent the real estate housing object utility as a sum of part-worth utilities of various attributes. Using special research design we estimate the utility of current market offer. The results highlight that the reason of poor sales performance could underlie in the gap between consumers’ preferences and real estate housing items configuration.