Key determinants for purchasing pirated software among students

摘要

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.