Understanding today’s music acquisition mix: a latent class analysis of consumers’ combined use of music platforms

In response to diversifying music delivery modes, consumers increasingly combine various music platforms, both online and offline, legal and illegal, and free or paying. Based on survey data (N?=?685), the current study segments consumers in terms of the combination of music delivery modes they use. We identify four latent classes based on their usage frequency of purchasing CDs, copying CDs, streaming music, streaming music videos, peer-to-peer file sharing, and purchased downloading. All-round users (9.9 %) use most or all acquisition modes, but at a low frequency. Traditionalist (33.7 %) typically makes no use of any of the acquisition modes except buying CDs. Streamers-downloaders (20.7 %) use several acquisition modes intensively, especially streaming (video and/or music only) and downloading (legal and illegal). Light users (35.6 %) also use multiple acquisition modes, but less frequently. We draw theoretical and practical implications, discuss limitations, and suggest ideas for future research.     

Performance evaluation of portfolio insurance strategies using stochastic dominance criteria

This paper evaluates the performance of the stop-loss, synthetic put and constant proportion portfolio insurance techniques based on a block-bootstrap simulation. We consider not only traditional performance measures, but also some recently developed measures that capture the non-normality of the return distribution (value-at-risk, expected shortfall, and the Omega measure). We compare them to the more comprehensive stochastic dominance criteria. The impact of changing the rebalancing frequency and level of capital protection is examined. We find that, even though a buy-and-hold strategy generates higher average excess returns, it does not stochastically dominate the portfolio insurance strategies, nor vice versa. Our results indicate that a 100% floor value should be preferred to lower floor values and that daily-rebalanced synthetic put and CPPI strategies dominate their counterparts with less frequent rebalancing.