The Impact of the Agency Model on E-book Prices: Evidence from the UK

Maximilian Maurice Gail and Phil-Adrian Klotz ()
Additional contact information
Maximilian Maurice Gail: Justus Liebig University Giessen
Phil-Adrian Klotz: Justus Liebig University Giessen

MAGKS Papers on Economics from Philipps-Universität Marburg, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, Department of Economics (Volkswirtschaftliche Abteilung)

Abstract: This paper empirically analyzes the effect of the widely used agency model on retail prices of e-books sold in the United Kingdom. Using an unique cross-sectional dataset of e-book prices for a large number of book titles across all major publishing houses, we exploit cross-genre and cross-publisher variation to identify the 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 also apply a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) approach to determine detailed book genres based on the book’s descriptions. We find that retail prices for e-books sold under the agency model are on average 18% cheaper than book titles sold under the wholesale model. Our results are robust to different regression specifications, an instrumental variable approach, and double machine learning techniques.

Keywords: e-books; agency; resale price maintenance; Amazon; double machine learning; Latent Dirichlet allocation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 D22 L42 L81 L82 Z11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 57 pages
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cmp, nep-com, nep-cul and nep-eur
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Forthcoming in

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.uni-marburg.de/en/fb02/research-groups ... ers/11-2021_gail.pdf First 202111 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mar:magkse:202111

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MAGKS Papers on Economics from Philipps-Universität Marburg, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, Department of Economics (Volkswirtschaftliche Abteilung) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bernd Hayo ().