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The market for digital content (e.g., music or movies) has been affected by large numbers of Internet users downloading content for free from illegitimate sources. The music industry has been exposed most severely to these developments and has reacted with several different online business models but with only limited success thus far. These business models include attempts to attract consumers by offering free downloads while relying on advertising as a revenue source. Using a latent-class choice-based conjoint analysis, we analyze the attractiveness of these business models from the consumer's perspective. Our findings indicate that advertising-based models have the potential to attract consumers who would otherwise refrain from commercial downloading, that they cannot threaten the dominance of download models like iTunes, and that current market prices for subscription services are unattractive to most consumers.

Market response models based on field-generated data need to address potential endogeneity in the regressors to obtain consistent parameter estimates. Another requirement is that market response models predict well in a holdout sample. With both requirements combined, it may seem reasonable to subject an endogeneity-corrected model to a holdout prediction task, and this is quite common in the academic marketing literature. One may be inclined to expect that the consistent parameter estimates obtained via instrumental variables (IV) estimation predict better than the biased ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates. This paper shows that this expectation is incorrect. That is, if the holdout sample is similar to the estimation sample so that the regressors are endogenous in both samples, holdout sample validation favors regression estimates that are not corrected for endogeneity (i.e., OLS) over estimates that are corrected for endogeneity (i.e., IV estimation). We also discuss ways in which holdout samples may be used sensibly in the presence of endogeneity. A key takeaway is that if consistent parameter estimates are the primary model objective, the model should be validated with an exogenous (rather than endogenous) holdout sample.

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