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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Veröffentlicht in:MAGKS - Joint Discussion Paper Series in Economics (Band 11-2021)
Autoren: Gail, Maximiliam Maurice, Klotz, Phil-Adrian
Format: Artikel
Sprache:Englisch
Veröffentlicht: Philipps-Universität Marburg 2021
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Zusammenfassung: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.
Umfang:56 Seiten
ISSN:1867-3678
DOI:10.17192/es2024.0687