An interesting battle is looming over Apple's newspaper and magazines subscription pricing for iOS devices (notably the iPad). Apple's offer to publishers is simple. They can offer an app that allows consumers to buy individual issues of their content or to subscribe to it from within the app; the publisher sets the pricing. But Apple …
The Flipside of Cisco's Flip Decision
In 2009, I purchased a Flip HD camcorder. Around the same time, Cisco purchased Flip, the company, for about $600 million. It was never clear precisely what Cisco was up to, but with YouTube being a big deal, some form of Internet connectivity seemed to top the list of the possible "synergies." It took Cisco just a …
In digital media, the commercial value of the pile
Recently, the satirical newspaper The Onion captured — and not for the first time — just what I wanted to write about in this post with its article "'The Economist' to Halt Production for Month to Let Readers Catch Up." Still, though, I think the five-issue-high pile of The Economist on my desk could tell us much about what …
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Apple's 'Buy Your Way Out of Piracy' Office
At the WWDC Apple announced its iCloud suite of apps. One of them was ‘iTunes in the Cloud.’ This was a free service that allowed consumers who had purchased music through iTunes to download that music and sync in across multiple devices (including the iPhone, iPad and both Macs and PCs). This provided ease of …
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Agreeing on Groupon
Harry Truman famously begged for a one-handed economist. Why? He was sick of his economic advisers saying "on the other hand." Charles Schultz expressed similar frustration here. The idea that economists hedge their bets or disagree constantly with one another is a feature of the discipline. We see it today over issues such as the deficit and health …
How not to rip off your customers
The title of this post surely seems somewhat strange. Surely any self-respecting business should be in the interest of making as much profit as possible, and the temptation might be to extract as much as you can from each customer interaction. But we know that such views can be too short-term. In many situations, while …
Pay what you want experiments. From Stephen King to Kickstarter
Back in 2000, Stephen King tried something new in selling a novel, The Plant. He decided to offer it exclusively online — in digital format — knowing that there was effectively no protection against copying. Of course, King was well aware that selfishness may be against him and so decided to offer his book in installments. …
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Finding Yahoo's way
Last year I had the pleasure of presenting a seminar at Yahoo Research. One of the things that interested me about that part of Yahoo was the fact that it had, in my field of economics, made some very significant hires from academia. In a time where some academically oriented labs had fallen aside, Yahoo …
The Kindle does not want to be free
In 1974, hundreds of thousands of Australians with a bank account in good standing received a piece of plastic in the mail: a credit card, known as a Bankcard, launched and operated by a consortium of Australian banks. In one swoop, a payment instrument that had been previously available to only the wealthy in Australia (through …
The Missing Market for Failure
We are told that some large fraction (possibly 80 percent) of small, entrepreneurial businesses fail. The hard part is working out why. You may notice a restaurant has closed in your neighborhood. If it seemed popular, you wonder if the owner left for greener pastures or there was some hidden health issue no one had …
Digitopoly 