Essays on pricing, product quality, and intellectual property rights protection in the software market
Abstract
In this thesis, I explore the particular issues of pricing, product quality selection, and intellectual property rights (IPR) protection in the software market. In the first part of the thesis, I study price discrimination in a monopolistic software market.
The monopolist charges different prices for the upgrade version and for the full version. Consumers are heterogeneous in taste for software that is infinitely durable and there is no resale.
I show that price discrimination leads to a higher software quality but raises both absolute price and price per quality.