Economic Incentives in Software Design

Hal Varian ()

Computational Economics, 1993, vol. 6, issue 3-4, 17 pages

Abstract: I examine the incentives for software providers to design appropriate user interfaces. There are two sorts of costs involved when one uses software: the fixed cost of learning to use a piece of software and the variable cost of operating the software. I show that a monopoly provider of software generally invests the right amount of resources in making the software easy to learn, but too little in making it easy to operate. In some extreme cases a monopolist may even make the software too easy to learn. Citation Copyright 1993 by Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Date: 1993
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