On Tue, Sep 17, 2002 at 02:51:38PM -0400, Robin Hanson wrote: > This would seem to work badly for socially consumed information goods, > like movies or music. If a group of us decides to watch a movie > together, one of us tries to download the movie, at which point he may > be denied. Should this unusual thing happen, another of us tries. > Only in the very unlikely circumstance that all of us are denied will we > actually have to face the possibility of paying for it.
That's a very good point, but there's a fix for it. If someone is denied access on a device, the device will not allow anyone else to access the information for a short period of time, say a day. We can also estimate the distribution of viewer group sizes, just by randomly polling people on that question when they view movies. I assume people will answer truthfully since it doesn't involve any cost or mental effort, but if we find that people are lying about it we can give them incentives to answer truthfully, for example free lottery tickets that only pay off if they told the truth. > And even then > all we'll reveal is the opportunity cost of this movie, relative to a > bunch of other movies we expect to be able to download for free. That's true, but what's the problem? Isn't the social value of a new movie just the sum of what people would pay to see it, assuming all existing movies are free?
