Title: Key determinants for purchasing pirated software among students

Authors: Bikramjit Rishi; Abhishek Kumar Mehra

Addresses: Institute of Management Technology, Raj Nagar, Hapur Road, Ghaziabad, UP, 201001, India ' Accenture Services Private Limited, 11th Floor, Building No. 1, Tower – B, Infospace, Sector 21, Dundahera, Gurgaon, Haryana, India

Abstract: This study tries to understand the non-financial factors, which influence the purchase of pirated software. The research design is descriptive in nature. The questionnaire was filled by 400 students selected conveniently from the institutions selected for this study. The study has used factor analysis to validate the constructs. Thereafter, the study have used multivariate regression analysis to assess the influence of independent variables on the dependent variable. The results suggests that factors like value consciousness, lesser knowledge of copyright laws and novelty seeking behaviour of users are key determinants for purchasing pirated software. On the other hand, respondents did not view such purchases as unethical and even though they were aware about areas where the original software was available, still they preferred to purchase the counterfeit products. Moreover, social factors like normative susceptibility and informative susceptibility were also not considered significant.

Keywords: software piracy; purchase intention; novelty seeking behaviour; normative influence; pirated software purchasing; students; non-financial factors; value consciousness; copyright laws; unethical behaviour; ethics; counterfeit products.

DOI: 10.1504/IJTMKT.2017.081504

International Journal of Technology Marketing, 2017 Vol.12 No.1, pp.4 - 22

Received: 26 Sep 2015
Accepted: 13 Apr 2016
Published online: 10 Jan 2017 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article