The Agency Model for Digital Goods
The Agency Model for Digital Goods
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DOI：
10.2139/ssrn.2297484
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发表时间：
2013-12
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Y. Tan;J. Carrillo;Hsing Kenny Cheng
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Y. Tan;J. Carrillo;Hsing Kenny Cheng
虽然娱乐、软件和出版等数字商品行业正在快速发展，但传统的供应链合同模式已经无法跟上新的数字经济的发展。为了说明这一点，电子图书出版业所采用的代理模式最近受到了美国司法部起诉苹果公司的负面关注。电子书行业新兴的代理模式是这样运作的：出版商设定数字产品的价格，而作为代理的零售商从消费者购买的图书中获得一定比例的收入。监管机构声称，代理模式不仅损害了消费者的福利，也损害了整个行业，因为引入代理模式后，电子书的价格上涨了。我们通过一个供应商和两个竞争零售商组成的数字商品供应链来研究代理模型的战略影响。与基准批发模型相比，我们发现代理模型可以通过将协调的利润分成预先协商好的收益分成比例来协调竞争的零售商。此外，我们还确定了帕累托改进区域，其中供应商和零售商都更倾向于代理模式而不是批发模式。我们关于代理模式的主要定性见解仍然成立，即使我们考虑了市场上印刷书籍的存在。因此，与目前媒体预测代理模式对电子书行业的负面影响相反，我们发现代理模式在这个数字商品行业中对出版商、零售商和消费者来说都优于传统的批发合同。
While digital goods industries such as entertainment, software, and publishing are growing at a rapid pace, traditional supply chain contract models have failed to evolve with the new digital economy. To illustrate, the agency model utilized by the e-book publishing industry has recently received much negative attention brought by the U.S. Department of Justice's lawsuit against Apple, Inc. The emerging agency model in the e-book industry works as follows: the publisher sets the price of the digital goods and the retailers who serve as agents retain a percentage of the revenue associated with a consumer purchase. The regulators claim that the agency model is hurting this industry as well as the consumer's welfare because e-book prices have increased after the introduction of the agency model. We investigate the strategic impact of the agency model by examining a digital goods supply chain with one supplier and two competing retailers. In comparison to the benchmark wholesale model, we find that the agency model can coordinate the competing retailers by dividing the coordinated profits into a prenegotiated revenue sharing proportion. Further, we also identify the Pareto improving region whereby both the supplier and the retailers prefer the agency model to the wholesale model. Our main qualitative insight regarding the agency model still holds even when we consider the presence of the printed books in the marketplace. Thus, contrary to current press presaging the negative impact of the agency model on the e-books industry, we find the agency model to be superior to the traditional wholesale contracts for publishers, retailers and consumers in this digital goods industry.