EXPRESS: The Effects of Collectivism and Organizational Tenure on the Emergence of Pre-Release Digital Piracy

As businesses increasingly move into digital domains, digital piracy has become more prevalent and more costly. Pre-release piracy, where pirated versions of digital products are distributed before legitimate ones, remains particularly damaging to digital product developers. Although workers’ social norms may play a critical role, limited research exists on the behavioral factors that intentionally or unintentionally contribute to pre-release piracy, particularly when considering multinational nuances (e.g., national cultures) and workers’ experience (e.g., organizational tenure). To address this gap, we develop and test an empirical model of how national culture and organizational tenure jointly predict the likelihood of pre-release piracy. Our empirical analyses employ a dataset compiled from more than 20 distinct sources and capture the electronic video game industry's PC-based products from 2000 through 2019. For national culture, we focus on two forms of collectivism—institutional and in-group—finding that institutional collectivism is associated with a reduced likelihood of pre-release piracy, while in-group collectivism increases it. We also find that the likelihood of pre-release piracy reduces with a product development team's organizational tenure, but that this relationship is distinctively moderated by each of collectivism's two forms. Specifically, the benefits of increased organizational tenure are amplified in the presence of stronger institutional collectivism but muted in the presence of stronger in-group collectivism. We link our findings to research streams on national culture, digital piracy, and organizational tenure, and specify contributions to each.