Site licensing of electronic journals has revolutionized the way academic information is distributed. However, many librarians are concerned about the possibility that commercial publishers might abuse site licensing by the practice of bundling. In this paper, we analyze how bundling affects journal pricing in the market of scientific, technical, and medical electronic journals and offer a novel insight on the bundling of a large number of information goods. We find that (i) when bundling is prohibited, surprisingly, industry concentration does not affect prices; (ii) when bundling is allowed, each publisher finds bundling profitable and bundling increases industry profits while reducing social welfare; and (iii) any merger among publishers already active in the market is profitable but reduces social welfare. (JEL: D4, K21, L41, L82) (c) 2006 by the European Economic Association.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)