How much of the decline in sound recording sales is due to file-sharing?

Although most studies of file-sharing have concluded that file-sharing has decreased record sales, the extent of the decreased sales often seems uneven. This paper demonstrates that the results are more uniform than previously understood once a consistent metric is used to provide easy comparability across studies. This paper uses the percent of the decline in record sales that is due to file-sharing as a metric to translate the results of the literature into a common framework and then summarizes those results. What has not been previously noted is that the estimates from most studies imply that the impact of file-sharing was sufficient to have caused the entire decline in record sales that occurred from the advent of Napster up to about 2005. A smaller number of studies using post-2005 data indicate that the shift to digital formats may also have contributed to the sales decline that continued after 2005.     

Intellectual property and optimal copyright protection

Copyright protection, or more generally, intellectual property rights, can be regarded as a means for the stimulation of production of information goods. This paper analyses the basic problem of production and dissemination of information and the role of copyright protection as an incentive for the producers of creative works. Using a simple model, it is shown that not only a cause for limiting the extent of copyright protection does exist, but that also an argument for a minimum level of protection can be found. Even optimal copyright protection, given the restriction that production and dissemination of information goods has to be co-ordinated by a market mechanism, however, does not lead to a first-best (allocatively efficient) solution. Hence, the judgment that copyright protection is the best solution to the basic problem can be grounded only on a comparative institutional approach.Indeed, one has ample reason to despair of finding a legal tenet that governs the rights of authors and artists. There exists no legal principle by which the state is forced to grant to authors a right in their creation. They cannot claim any right thereupon. This is not to say that the state shall not award such a right. On the contrary, there is every reason to treat them like the most favoured workers, as they deliver a work that is more robust than ashlar, and bring food that does not decay...     

Humor and heuristics: culture,genre, and economic thought in The Big Short

This article uses the 2015 film, The Big Short, to explore the limits of representing and critiquing Wall Street culture on film. Critics have praised the film, suggesting that it offers an account of the 2007–2008 financial crisis that both critiques Wall Street culture and democratizes financial knowledge. I argue that the film is an early representative example of a public narrative based on behavioral economics. A popular movie informed by this discipline has a good deal of political potential for challenging injustices produced by neoliberal approaches to the financial services industry. However, I also argue that despite this political potential, The Big Short is unable to fundamentally challenge the belief in efficient markets that justify many of Wall Street’s practices. I also argue that the film uses unexamined and problematic understandings of both class and gender in characterizing the film’s protagonists.     

Compulsive Hoarding: Psychopathologies of Print,Phenomenologies of Text

Abstract

Over the past two decades, compulsive hoarding – that seemingly-new psychopathology – has quickly progressed from academic departments of psychology to mass-media portrayals of consumption that rely on spectacles of the grotesque. What these pop-culture portrayals of the phenomenon gloss over is that those labeled ‘hoarders’ are very often specifically concerned with the hoarding of books, newspapers, and other textual objects. Even non-textual items are saved for quasi-textual purposes, as repositories of information that do not deserve to be destroyed. After comparison with forms of textual hoarding evident in early print culture (specifically, in early-modern Britain), this essay argues that contemporary hoarding phenomena should be understood in light of the ongoing digitisation of textuality, and that a full accounting of textual hoarding must move from the psychological to the phenomenological. While there is a spectrum of hoarding behaviors that should not be oversimplified, physical textual hoarding seems to constitute a hedge against the etherealisation of text. On the contrary, by the functionalist leanings of contemporary behavioral psychology, the emerging pattern of hoarding digital texts allows for the imperfectly-realised possibility of a hoard without impairment. An implication for elite critical practice is that in the growth of the digital hoard, and the growing reliance on the search function to navigate it, the critic may be liberated from the traditional aspiration to an absolute mastery which grows ever-more untenable, but at the cost of self-imposed limitations that are needed so to enable speech.     

Pricing as the Key to Attracting Students to the Performing Arts

There is a general assumption that young people do not attend arts events because ticket prices are too high. To test the validity of this assumption, a survey of students' attitudes toward attending the performing arts was conducted. The data revealed that whilst students are concerned about cost, the major barrier is the perception that arts events are boring. It was found that students will purchase tickets for arts events that are perceived as entertaining and allow socialisation. This work continues the discussion contained in the recently published paper by John W. O'Hagan on equal participation in the arts.     

Introduction: Are We All Cultural Workers Now?

Introducing a themed section entitled ‘Are We All Cultural Workers Now?’, this article explores the relation between precarity and cultural work. It argues that precarity should be understood as an experience rather than a category that allows a mapping of transformations of social class. The article also engages with current debates on cultural work and questions the proposition that changes in this area presage more general shifts in the organisation and exploitation of labour. Finally the piece introduces the four articles that make up the themed section.     

Cultured meat and cowless milk: on making markets for animal-free food

According to its proponents, animal-free animal food products, such as cultured meat and synthetic cow’s milk, have the potential to overcome various environmental, health and ethical challenges that have emerged around global animal product consumption and the industrial agriculture that is needed to support it. Apart from the myriad of technical problems making animal-free food products, critics have pointed out the blurry ontological status of the food and the ethical challenges therein, and have questioned the veracity of the various promissory narratives being produced. This paper considers animal-free food from a social studies of economies and markets (SSEM) perspective. As a market that currently mostly only exists in potential, an SSEM perspective can reveal the various social and material relations that comprise the (bio)capital formation that will underpin any market-to-be, an aspect of markets that are often invisible once markets are up and running. Moreover, this perspective details the intimate role markets have in establishing the ethical and ontological aspects of animal-free foods in a political economy shaped by neoliberalisation and financialisation.     

Long- and Short-Term Portfolio Choices of Paintings

In their paper on price comovements of paintings, Ginsburgh and Jeanfils show that in three important markets (London, Paris and New York), prices of well-known and lesser known painters 'move together' (are cointegrated). They conclude that therefore, an investor may be indifferent between the two groups of painters. We show that this is not the case, since well-known painters are less risky, and that though returns may be comparable, the share of well-known painters in a portfolio of paintings might be as high as 90%. We also construct long-run and short-run portfolios and show that these may be very different. These short-term portfolios give interesting insights which help in characterizing each of the three markets.     

Money and moneyness: thoughts on the nature and distributional power of the ‘backbone’ of capitalist political economy

This paper contends that political economy may profit from an understanding of money that is both able to account for its systemic importance as well as money’s specific role for the contemporary distribution of wealth. ‘Money-ness’ is a strategic factor in profit-making and capital accumulation. If we accord moneyness to all those instruments that make the repackaging of credit and other financial assets and liabilities and their capitalization possible, we arrive at an understanding of money that underscores the Marxian analysis of the structural importance of the money relation for capital accumulation that is up to speed with current financial innovations. As a social structure and process, moneymaking through capital permeates society. As a public-private deal between the state, rentiers, banks, and taxpayers that has existed since the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694, it binds these actors together in shifting relations of dependence. Under financial capitalism today, what counts as money and how far moneyness stretches into the realms of financial innovation has been a core object of struggle in the public-private deal of money creation.     

The Role of Competition in the Rise of Baroque and Renaissance Music

Section 1 introduces the hypothesis that competition among neighboring states may favor cultural innovation, and it surveys the available quantitative evidence. Section 2 starts from the assumption that European instrumental music had its breakthrough during the Baroque era and that the most famous composers came from the two countries characterized by the highest degree of political fragmentation: Italy and Germany. It suggests that political fragmentation has promoted musical composition and performance in several ways. The average duration of employment is proposed as a proxy for competition on the demand side. Section 3 shows that the most famous Italian and German composers of the Baroque period changed their employers significantly more often than their French and British counterparts did. Moreover, the Reformation led to musical competition between the Catholic and Protestant churches. Section 4 argues that competition for composers has also been important in other periods of European history – including competition between the Church and the courts. It shows that composers moved no less in the Renaissance than in the Baroque. Section 5 raises the question whether European music may also be said to express a competitive spirit. JEL classification: Z11     

RESOCIALIZING FINANCE? OR DRESSING IT IN MUFTI?

Critical accounts of the financialization of the world economy decry the depersonalization and abstraction effected by finance in the service of extraction, expropriation and dispossession. Analysts and activists alike seek to re-socialize finance so that those whose interests it serves can be identified and so that new, socially embedded forms of exchange can emerge. They also seek to re-ground finance in a ‘real’, presumably material and social, fabric so that its excesses can be tamed and the sources of value made apparent. My essay questions these paired critiques and their supposed aims. It will argue that the continual attempt to reassert the social in economy points to a limit to the critical imagination, and that the critique of calculative rationality misses some of the other functions and practical effects of numbers besides commensuration and abstraction.     

Uncertainty in the Movie Industry: Does Star Power Reduce the Terror of the Box Office?

Everyone knows that the movie business is risky. But how risky is it? Do strategies exist that reduce risk? We investigate these questions using a sample of over 2000 motion pictures. We discover that box-office revenues are asymptotically Pareto-distributed and have infinite variance. The mean is dominated by rare blockbuster movies that are located in the far right tail. There is no typical movie because box-office revenue outcomes do not converge to an average: revenues diverge over all scales. The studio model of risk management lacks a foundation in theory or evidence, and revenue forecasts have zero precision. Movies are complex products and the cascade of information among film-goers during the course of a film's run can evolve along so many paths that it is impossible to attribute the success of a movie to individual causal factors. The audience makes a movie a hit and no amount of “star power” or marketing can alter that. The real star is the movie.     

Research Prioritization and the Potential Pitfall of Path Dependencies in Coral Reef Science

Studies of how scientists select research problems suggest the process involves weighing a number of factors, including funding availability, likelihood of success versus failure, and perceived publishability of likely results, among others. In some fields, a strong personal interest in conducting science to bring about particular social and environmental outcomes plays an important role. Conservation biologists are frequently motivated by a desire that their research will contribute to improved conservation outcomes, which introduces a pair of challenging questions for managers of science and scholars of policies governing science: 1) How do scientists integrate that goal into their processes of research priority evaluation, and 2) How can managers and funders of science utilize that knowledge in designing and administering funding programs? I use Q method to uncover four distinct schools of thought amongst researchers and knowledge-users about the merits of possible research priorities for coral reefs; one of the axes along which these schools of thought differ is in their interpretation of how science can and should interact with policy. The results reveal that perceived severity of reef stressors plays a role for some participants. Disciplinary training does not appear to be a major influence on research priority evaluation, but individual participants indicated professional expediency does prevent some researchers from pursuing or advocating that others pursue topics outside of that disciplinary specialty. Influences on and processes in research prioritization uncovered in this study have the potential to lead to counter-productive disciplinary path dependencies. From these results and building on outside literature, I conclude that better coordination and communication about research priorities across disciplines and with broader stakeholders – including knowledge users – could improve the research enterprise’s ability to contribute to meaningful societal and conservation goals. These findings are relevant to researchers and research administrators across disciplines that seek to conduct or fund science that is useful in addressing specific goals.     

On the Symbolic Production of Digital Markets for Cultural Goods

This paper proposes and mobilizes a cultural economic framework to study the dynamic formation of digital markets for cultural goods. Adapting Hayek's theory of price to recent developments in the field of cultural sociology, it proposes the idea that an effective price system condenses information dispersed in society, and then enters into a performative process of symbolic communication that is perceived as ‘authentic’ by the consumers. After analyzing ‘artificial’ and ‘authentic’ current strategies aimed at producing digital markets for cultural goods, which are especially sensitive to the symbolic dimension of price, the article suggests the hypothesis that the digital market has been constructed as a zero- or quasi-zero-price economic space, and that it is the offline and material market of cultural products the one that collects the higher revenues derived from the ‘authentic’ generation of value taking place in the digital marketplace.     

The Senses of Personhood: Beyond Allegories of the Body

This essay explores the resources for human mindedness that counter-intuitively inhere in representations of human sexuality – coitus specifically. I maintain that the problematic relation between the aesthetic register of representations of the sexual act and the intellectual presuppositions of the readers/viewers of such representations is analogous to the interpretive problems posed by allegory. Drawing upon the mind–body conflicts that are dramatised in allegorical representational practices deployed by writers like Ovid and Dante, painters like Bronzino and Courbet, I argue that it makes sense to think of allegory as continuous with rather than antithetical to figura. Just so, mind may be grasped as continuous with physical experience. This continuity is interestingly and usefully revealed to be a presupposition of contemporary neuro-philosophical accounts of conceptual blending. Finally, my purpose will be to demonstrate that the conceptuality we presuppose in standard notions of allegory is inadequate to the burdens and responsibilities of existential cognitive agency–real personhood. This is specifically true if we come to understand allegory, particularly the allegory of love, as unselfconsciously involved in a form of thinking that brooks no distinction between feeling and knowing.     

Opening the Regulatory Black Box of Clinical Cancer Research: Transnational Expertise Networks and “Disruptive” Technologies

Building on previous work on “regulatory objectivity,” the paper examines recent translational research and cancer genomics to explore the bundle of scientific and regulatory activities that generate and manage the platforms at the core of clinical trials, the “gold standard” of clinical research and evidence-based medicine. In particular, the paper explores the activities of a chain of mediators within a seamless regulatory web characterized by the interaction of endogenous and hybrid regulatory activities that are neither hierarchical nor linear. We contend that a full understanding of the dynamics of regulation in the biomedical domain ought to consider this chain of mediations; that their analysis necessitates understanding the content of the practices they regulate; and that in addition to examining the interactions between different regulatory modalities, we need to pay attention to their development insofar as regulation, far from being mere routine, leads to the emergence of novelty by coproducing the entities it regulates. These activities include not only setting out the conditions that must be respected in order to produce reliable test results, but also the conditions that define the relations (within a clinical context) between the different components of diagnosis as well as the consequences of such relations on clinical judgment. This is why we cannot treat organizational practices as distinct from the content of bio-clinical activities.     

Performing property cycles

Economists characterize fluctuations in property markets as ‘cyclical’ in that characteristics repeat and recur instead of being temporally isolated or random. I argue that cycle metaphors naturalize change and distract us from the social and institutional relations underpinning transformation in local property markets. I emphasize the performative nature of cycles by focusing on the networks of actors – brokers, appraisers, investors, and planners – that move capital through the built environment, articulating arguments for its free passage, identifying inflexion points, and temporarily stabilizing the meanings associated with individual buildings, submarkets, and periods. Drawing from a case study of an office development cycle in downtown Chicago (1998–2009), I argue that cycles can be treated not only as metaphors that describe economic processes, but also as socially effective constructions in their own right. Specifically, I consider three ways in which actors perform cycles, including (1) professionals’ use of market devices that contain within them assumptions regarding the proper timing of (dis)investment; (2) the existence of incentives for herding among professionals that draw them to and away from assets at roughly the same times; and (3) the importance of cycle thinking in instilling the confidence necessary to speculate on an unknown future.     

Evaluating three decades of the European Capital of Culture programme: a difference-in-differences approach

We measure the regional impact of the European Capital of Culture programme using a difference-in-differences approach. We compare the regions of cities that hosted the event with the regions of cities that tried to host it but did not succeed. GDP per capita in hosting regions is 4.5 % higher compared to non-hosting regions during the event, and the effect persists more than 5 years after it. This result suggests that the economic dimension of the event is important and supports claims that the event serves as catalyst for urban regeneration and development.     

Determinants of demand and price for best-selling novels in paperback in Japan

This study empirically investigates the factors affecting demand for best-selling novels in paperback, including the relationship with other formats (hardcover and e-book), and the determinants of prices by estimating the demand for paperbacks and price equations. The results show that paperbacks that have hardcover versions with large sales and that are original novels made into movies or television dramas tend to be best sellers. It is also found that expected demand is not a significant determinant of paperback price, whereas the number of pages is a major factor influencing price.