Book Pricing Update - Trends in Pricing by Broad Subject Category

Software Pricing Trends

E-book Pricing and Vertical Restraints∗

This paper empirically analyzes how the use of vertical price restraints has impacted retail prices in the market for e-books. In 2010 five of the six largest publishers simultaneously adopted the agency model of book sales, allowing them to directly set retail prices. This led the Department of Justice to file suit against the publishers in 2012, the settlement of which prevents the publishers...

Category Pricing with State-Dependent Utility

T is substantial literature documenting the presence of state-dependent utility with packaged goods data. Typically, a form of brand loyalty is detected whereby there is a higher probability of purchasing the same brand as has been purchased in the recent past. The economic significance of the measured loyalty remains an open question. We consider the category pricing problem and demonstrate th...

Optimal Category Pricing with Endogenous Store Traffic

We propose a dynamic programming framework for retailers of frequently-purchased consumer goods in which the prices affect both the profit-per-visit in the current period and the number of visitors (i.e., store traffic) in future periods. We show that optimal category prices in the infinite-horizon problem also maximize the closed form sum of a geometric series, allowing us to derive meaningful...

Structural Demand Models for Retailer Category Pricing

One critical aspect of retailer category management is pricing the brands within the category in order to maximize total category profits. Unlike the manufacturer, a retailer must carefully assess how changes in brand prices affect substitution between brands and overall category profits. In this paper, we demonstrate that structural demand models have inherent advantages over commonly used non...