School of Communication, Information and Library
Studies,
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
Gary A. Golden
Rutgers University Library
Rutgers University, Camden, NJ
Abstract
This is a progress report on
an
ongoing study of pricing information goods and services on the
Internet.
We consider the possibility of setting an optimum price for an
information
resource, based on the observed willingness to buy at two or more test
prices. We show that for simple assumptions about the dependence of
willingness
on price, it is easy to determine the optimum price with rather high
confidence,
in a relatively short period of time. We also show that, in the
university
library setting, the arrival of customers is not predictable enough to
permit us to use variations in the arrival rate as a surrogate for
willingness
to pay. We speculate on the implications of this result for managers
of
university research libraries, and for others doing business in the
online
environment.
This work was performed at the Alexandria Project Laboratory,
School
of Communication, Information and Library Studies, Rutgers
University.The research was supported in part by a Grant from the Council
on Library and Information Resources(CLIR).
