PEAK: Pricing electronic access to knowledge

Library Collections, Acquisition and Technical Services

Volumn 21, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 281-295

  Mackie Mason, Jeffrey K ^a   Jankovich, Alexandra L L ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

^b ELSEVIER MASSON   (France)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 54249165184     PISSN: 14649055     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/s0364-6408(97)00020-3     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (35)

1. Bakos, Y., and E. Brynjolfsson. "Bundling Information Goods: Pricing, Profits and Efficiency," University of California. Irvine Working Paper. 1996, pp. 1-30. Presented at the Conference on Economics of Digital Information and Intellectual Property, Harvard University, January 1997.
2. Chuang, J., and M. Sirbu. "The Bundling and Unbundling of Information Goods: Economic Incentives for the Network Delivery of Academic Journal Articles," Presented at the Conference on Economics of Digital Information and Intellectual Property, Harvard University, January 1997.
3. MacKie-Mason, J., and J. F. Riveros. "Economics and Electronic Access to Scholarly Information." Presented at the Conference on Economics of Digital Information and Intellectual Property, Harvard University, January 1997. Includes a brief survey of the state of the theoretical literature on bundling and some of its gaps.
4. Kling, Rob, and Roberta Lamb. "Analyzing Alternate Visions of Electronic Publishing and Digital Libraries." Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier, eds. R. Peek and G. Newby, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. Offers an insightful discussion of utopian discourse on information technology and electronic publishing.
5. Harnad, Stevan. "Implementing Peer Review on the Net: Scientific Quality Control in Scholarly Electronic Journals," Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier, eds. R. Peek and G. Newby. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996.
6. Odlyzko, Andrew. "Tragic Loss or Good Riddance? The Impending Demise of Traditional Scholarly Journals," International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 42 (1995), 71-122.
7. Fisher, Janet. "Traditional Publishers and Electronic Journals," Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier, eds. R. Peek and G. Newby. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. A nice overview of the value-added functions provided by publishers.
8. Hayes, Brian. "The Economic Quandary of the Network Publisher," Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier, eds. R. Peek and G. Newby. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. Nicely characterizes the publisher's role in bringing readers to authors.
9. The competitive equilibrium result assumes that there are no externalities. This means that the amount of publishing services received by any one agent does not directly affect the well being of any other agent. A typical externality is water pollution: the more that I produce, the worse the conditions for downstream residents.
10. Odlyzko, pp. 71-122.
11. Some publishers are sufficiently concerned with the effect of electronic distribution that they are treating posting of drafts and working papers on the Internet as prior publication and are refusing to consider such articles for their journals. Most American Psychological Association journal editors have adopted this policy, as have Neuroscience and The New England Journal of Medicine.
12. Most familiar pricing is "linear." That is, revenue increases linearly with quantity purchased, because revenue = price × quantity, and the price is a constant value for each quantity unit. Nonlinear pricing refers to a very broad class of schemes in which revenue increases nonlinearly with price. Quantity discounts and two-part tariffs (entry fee + per unit fee) are examples.
13. Users have found ways to arbitrage around some of the variable pricing conditions. For example, users have exploited "free format" features (free online records to test search strategies) by downloading 600-700 answers in free format, then choosing relevant citations offline and logging back in for retrieval.
14. Harnad, Stevan. "Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum of Scientific Inquiry," Psychological Science. 1 (1990), 342-343.
15. Harnad, "Implementing Peer Review on the Net."
16. Odlyzko points out that about half of all scholarly literature ever published has been published in just the last 10 years.
17. The University of Michigan and Elsevier anticipate that access to paid-for documents and bundles might persist beyond the life of the original project agreement, but that is not guaranteed.
18. Pay per article is traditionally available through at least three vehicles: by paying a per article royalty to the Copyright Clearance Center; by purchasing an article from a document delivery service (which in turn remits royalties); or, when fair use is invoked, by paying the cost of photocopying.
19. Chuang, J., and M. Sirbu.
20. Bakos, Y., and E. Brynjolfsson.
21. Of course, the selection of the number of sub-bundles, or journal titles, and the guidelines for their specialty content are endogenous. At a given point in time, mixed bundling might be superior to "traditional subscription only" because reader tastes are sufficiently aligned with journal boundaries. If the publisher responds to this mismatch, the relative value of traditional subscriptions may increase.
22. In 1996, the University of Michigan subscribed to approximately 69 engineering titles at an average cost of about $1,000/title, 13 economics titles ($900/title), and 134 medical titles ($1,200/title).
23. The causality may also run in the opposite direction, of course, but we expect that during the relatively short duration of this trial the purchasing decisions of the institution will likely be relatively predetermined with respect to individual decisions. Over a greater time horizon, the chance that library purchasing would respond to individual choices would likely increase.
24. Adams, W., and Yellen, J. "Commodity Bundling and the Burden of Monopoly," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 90 (1976), 475-498.
25. Deaton, A., and John Muellbauer. Economics and Consumer Behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
26. Gorman, W. M. "Separable Utility and Aggregation," Econometrica, 27 (1959), 469-481.
27. Katz, M. "Nonuniform Pricing, Output and Welfare under Monopoly," Review of Economic Studies, 50 (1983), 37-56.
28. MacKie-Mason, J., and D. Lawson. "Local Telephone Calling Demand When Customers Face Optional and Nonlinear Price Schedules," Working Paper, (1993): 1-33.
29. McAfee, R., J. McMillan, and M. Whinston. "Multiproduct Monopoly, Commodity Bundling and Correlation of Values," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 114 (1989), 371-384.
30. Schmalensee, R. "Commodity Bundling by a Single Product Monopolist," Journal of Law and Economics. 25 (1982), 67-71.
31. Stigler, G. "United States vs. Loew's Inc.: A Note on Block Booking," Supreme Court Review, (1963), 152-157.
32. Tirole, J. The Theory of Industrial Organization. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988.
33. Varian, H. Microeconomic Analysis. New York: Norton, 1992.
34. Wilson, R. Nonlinear Pricing. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
35. Zahray, W., and M. Sirbu. "The Provision of Scholarly Journals by Libraries via Electronic Technologies: An Economic Analysis," Information Economics and Policy, 4 (1990), 127-154.