A textbook example of international price discrimination

Abstract

We investigate differences in book prices between the United States and other countries. We find that general audience books are similarly priced internationally, but textbooks are substantially more expensive in the United States (often more than double the price). This disparity is much more pronounced for commercial publishers than for university presses. We argue that supply-side factors like cost and market structure can not explain this phenomenon. We discuss several demand-side explanations; our preferred theory is that higher US textbook prices reflect the unique status of the textbook as a centerpiece of US college instruction.

Low-cost airlines and online price dispersion

“…2 Furthermore, this study also documents a noticeable source of online price dispersion within each single airline's website and thus fills a gap in the literature, which has produced scant empirical evidence of online intra-firm price dispersion and has mainly focussed on the sources of online inter-firm price dispersion (see, inter alia, Baylis and Perloff, 2002;Baye et al, 2004;Brynjolfsson and Smith, 2000;Clay et al, 2001;Clemons et al, 2002;Smith and Brynjolfsson, 2001; and the surveys by Baye et al, 2006;Ellison and Ellison, 2005;Stole, 2007). A notable exception is the work by Cabolis et al (2007) showing evidence of international price discrimination for the economics textbook sold by Amazon on its US and British websites, with American prices being substantially more expensive. 3 To shed further light onto the properties and the motivations underlying the previously described pricing scenarios, the present paper draws from and aims to contribute to two generally distinct strands of literature, one studying price dispersion in e-commerce setups, the other in airline markets.…”

“…3 Whilst similar in spirit, our analysis on airline fares differs from that on textbooks in Cabolis et al (2007) for a number of reasons. First, in our case price divergence can be found on the same web domain.…”

Queensborough Community College: Textbook Reserve Collection

“…The average price of a hardcover textbook in the United States is 50% higher than the same book abroad. Cost factors do not explain the difference (Cabolis, Clerides, Ioannou, and Senft 2007). As of this writing, we await a Supreme Court decision on resale of textbooks produced internationally.…”

Pricing Strategies in the Electronic Marketplace

“…region. Cabolis et al (2007) is another study on price discrimination related to different cultures between countries. Taken together, these studies nicely complement the existing literature in which most efforts have documented interfirm equilibrium price dispersion (see Baye et al 2004a).…”