Bloatware and Jailbreaking: Strategic Impacts of Consumer-Initiated Modification of Technology Products
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Should a firm selling consumer electronics devices, such as smartphones, bundle these devices with bloatware? If consumers can remove bloatware by jailbreaking these devices, how should the firm adjust its prices and even its decision of bloatware inclusion? This research provides managerial insights for firms considering bloatware and policymakers regulating such practices. We show that it is not always optimal for a firm to sell a bloatware-included product. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that even if the firm can make it harder for consumers to jailbreak, the firm is not always better off by doing so. Consumers do not necessarily benefit from the reduced cost of jailbreaking either. Because the firm passes part of the bloatware revenue to consumers in the form of a lower price, whenever bloatware inclusion benefits the firm, consumers actually also benefit.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".