CHAPTER 5

Conceptual Perspectives

The Crisis in Pricing for Digital—Free? Paid? How Much?

The dynamics of networked commerce combined with the essentially free replication of digital offerings has created devilish problems that our current economics has yet to tame. Sellers have no clear rationale for setting prices and consumers feel they should not have to pay anything at all. Publishers seek to impose artificial scarcity (creating deadweight losses) and sometime impose practices that are downright customer-hostile. There is much debate and confusion over what should be free, ad-supported, and paid, and if paid, at what price?

The Value-Pricing Demon

The Prolog of this book proposed a thought experiment—hypothesizing an imaginary value-pricing ...

Get FairPay now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.