Quantifying the Impacts of Digital Rights Management and E-Book Pricing on the E-Book Reader Market

TLDR: In this article, the authors quantified the impact of digital rights management (DRM) and discounted e-book pricing on the demand for ebook readers and found that consumer welfare would decrease 6 to 10 percent if prices of e-books went up by 50 percent.

Abstract: The demand for electronic books (e-books) and the e-book readers are complementary. On the one hand, the emergence of e-book readers such as Amazon's Kindle has triggered the recent growth of the e-book market. On the other hand, several issues in the e-book market can affect the future of the e-book reader market. Considering this complementarity, this paper quantifies the impact of digital rights management (DRM) and discounted e-book pricing on the demand for e-book readers. We collect conjoint survey data to estimate a random coefficient demand model using a hierarchical Bayesian method. Our counterfactual experiments suggest two things. First, Kindle's and Nook's market shares would increase by dropping DRM. Consumer welfare would increase seven percent if all e-book readers dropped DRM. Second, an increase in e-book prices would increase iPad's market share at the expense of that of Kindle and Nook. Consumer welfare would decrease 6 to 10 percent if Kindle's and Nook's e-book prices went up by 50 percent.