Software Upgrades under Monopoly

Jiri Strelicky and Kresimir Zigic ()

CERGE-EI Working Papers from The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague

Abstract: We study price discrimination in a monopolistic software market. The monopolist charges different prices for the upgrade version and for the full version. Consumers are heterogeneous in taste for infinitely durable software and there is no resale. We show that price discrimination leads to a higher software quality but raises both absolute price and price per quality. This price discrimination does not increase sales and it decreases the total number of consumers compared to no discrimination. Finally, such discrimination decreases consumers' surplus but increases the developer's profit and social welfare that attains the social optimum in the limit.

Keywords: monopoly; durable goods; software; upgrades; price discrimination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C61 L12 L15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-ind, nep-mic and nep-mkt
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cer:papers:wp478

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