ABSTRACT
Friendship rewards us with a bond of loyalty and equality. The marketplace rewards us in proportion to what we have to offer. When friends work together to create something, and when the market judges their creation to have value, this sets up a clash between realms. Should the proceeds be distributed according to the values of friendship, or the values of the marketplace? This is a decision that confronts the majority of music groups that produce original content. What they answer, and how they reach that answer, illuminates connections across a number of topics – motivational psychology, collaborative dynamics, and creators’ default expectations – that have direct relevance for intellectual property law and the design of incentives in joint authorship.
In this article, I empirically investigate this topic in the domain of songwriting using a novel dataset and a preregistered blind-analyzed experiment. When a songwriter composes a new hit song, does the whole group share in the royalties? What if the other group members contributed, but only slightly? My dataset – covering 60 years and nearly 1,000 music groups with Gold Records – reveals three things: what they decide; how they decide; and whether the decision they reach impacts their collective productivity …
Polcz, Sarah, Loyalties v Royalties (October 23, 2021).
First posted 2021-12-14 17:00:29
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