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The Impact of the Agency Model on E-book Prices: Evidence from the UK
This paper empirically analyzes the effect of the widely used agency model on the retail prices of e-books in United Kingdom. Using a unique cross-sectional data set of e-book prices for a large sample of book titles across all major publishing houses, we exploit cross-genre and cross-publisher...
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| Published in: | MAGKS - Joint Discussion Paper Series in Economics (Band 11-2021) |
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| Main Authors: | , |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Philipps-Universität Marburg
2021
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | PDF Full Text |
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| Summary: | This paper empirically analyzes the effect of the widely used agency
model on the retail prices of e-books in United Kingdom. Using a
unique cross-sectional data set of e-book prices for a large sample of
book titles across all major publishing houses, we exploit cross-genre
and cross-publisher variation to identify the mean effect of the agency
model on e-book prices. Since the genre information is ambiguous and
even missing for some titles in our original dataset, we use a Latent
Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) approach to determine detailed book genres
based on the book's descriptions. We find that e-book prices for
titles that are sold under the agency model are 36% cheaper than titles
sold under the wholesale model on average. Our results are robust to
different specifications, a Lewbel instrumental variable approach, and
machine learning techniques. |
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| Physical Description: | 56 Pages |
| ISSN: | 1867-3678 |
| DOI: | 10.17192/es2024.0687 |