Home Information Goods Upgrades: Theory and Evidence
Article
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

Information Goods Upgrades: Theory and Evidence

  • V. Brian Viard
Published/Copyright: January 16, 2007
The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics
From the journal The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics Volume 7 Issue 1

A substantial portion of information goods is sold through upgrades. I model a monopolist offering successive generations of an information good in a dynamic model. In each period, the monopolist offers up to two prices for each generation: a full price to those who have never purchased and a version upgrade price to consumers who own a previous generation. I employ an overlapping generations model with infinite-lived firms and consumers that reflects the effect of future profits on current decisions better than previous two-period models. The model's predictions accord well with data from the PC software industry. The model explains why: 1) firms issued version upgrades with every new generation, 2) firms provided a discount to those upgrading relative to first-time buyers and 3) late adopters commonly purchased the latest version at full price even though some earlier adopters with higher valuations did not upgrade to the latest version.

Keywords: durable goods; upgrades; software; price discrimination; information goods; product obsolescence
Published Online: 2007-1-16

©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Topics Article
  2. Equilibria in Multi-Unit Discriminatory Auctions
  3. A Note on Generating Globally Regular Indirect Utility Functions
  4. Value Maximization as an Ex-Post Consistent Firm Objective When Markets are Incomplete
  5. On Corruption and Institutions in Decentralized Economies
  6. Best Agendas in Multi-Issue Bargaining
  7. First-Degree Discrimination by a Duopoly: Pricing and Quality Choice
  8. Interbank Competition with Costly Screening
  9. Taxes versus Permits in a Two-Stage Duopoly
  10. The Many Faces of Rationalizability
  11. Cross and Double Cross: Comparative Statics in First Price and All Pay Auctions
  12. Price Interventions in a Cournot Oligopoly with a Dominant Firm
  13. Mixed Oligopoly under Demand Uncertainty
  14. Tacit Collusion in Capacity Investment: The Role of Capacity Exchanges
  15. Tax Differentials and the Segmentation of Networks of Cooperation in Oligopoly
  16. When Does Competition Lead to Efficient Investments?
  17. Herding with Costly Observation
  18. Asymmetric Nash Bargaining with Surprised Players
  19. Competing Gatekeepers
  20. Monotone Comparative Statics in Ordered Vector Spaces
  21. Pareto Optima and Competitive Equilibria with Moral Hazard and Financial Markets
  22. Decreasing Relative Risk Premium
  23. Advertising as a Distortion of Social Learning
  24. Pricing Behavior of Multiproduct Retailers
  25. Auctions with Opportunistic Experts
  26. A Consistent Multidimensional Generalization of the Pigou-Dalton Transfer Principle: An Analysis
  27. On the Effect of Risk Aversion in Two-Person, Two-State Finance Economies
  28. Contributions Article
  29. Information Goods Upgrades: Theory and Evidence
  30. Staged Financing with a Variable Return
  31. A Decentralized Market for a Perishable Good
  32. Effective Scrappage Subsidies
  33. Sunspot Rational Beliefs Structures, Equilibria and Excess Volatility
  34. Repeated Auctions with the Right of First Refusal
  35. A Herding Perspective on Global Games and Multiplicity
  36. Bribery and Favoritism by Auctioneers in Sealed-Bid Auctions
  37. Oligopoly, Endogenous Monopolist and Product Quality
  38. When Can Manipulations be Avoided in Two-Sided Matching Markets? -- Maximal Domain Results
  39. Free Cash Flow and Managerial Entrenchment: A Continuous-Time Stochastic Control-Theoretic Model
  40. Collective Punishments: Incentives and Examinations in Organisations
  41. Von Neumann-Morgenstern Stable Set Bridges Time-Preferences to the Nash Solution
  42. Information-Invariant Equilibria of Extensive Games
  43. Contests with Ties
  44. Local Network Effects and Complex Network Structure
  45. Advances Article
  46. Relating Network Structure to Diffusion Properties through Stochastic Dominance
  47. Firm Size, Productivity, and Manager Wages: A Job Assignment Approach
  48. Rule-Based and Case-Based Reasoning in Housing Prices
  49. Market Entry Dynamics with a Second-Mover Advantage
  50. The Compensation Principle and the National Income Test
https://doi.org/10.2202/1935-1704.1126
Keywords for this article
durable goods; upgrades; software; price discrimination; information goods; product obsolescence

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Topics Article
  2. Equilibria in Multi-Unit Discriminatory Auctions
  3. A Note on Generating Globally Regular Indirect Utility Functions
  4. Value Maximization as an Ex-Post Consistent Firm Objective When Markets are Incomplete
  5. On Corruption and Institutions in Decentralized Economies
  6. Best Agendas in Multi-Issue Bargaining
  7. First-Degree Discrimination by a Duopoly: Pricing and Quality Choice
  8. Interbank Competition with Costly Screening
  9. Taxes versus Permits in a Two-Stage Duopoly
  10. The Many Faces of Rationalizability
  11. Cross and Double Cross: Comparative Statics in First Price and All Pay Auctions
  12. Price Interventions in a Cournot Oligopoly with a Dominant Firm
  13. Mixed Oligopoly under Demand Uncertainty
  14. Tacit Collusion in Capacity Investment: The Role of Capacity Exchanges
  15. Tax Differentials and the Segmentation of Networks of Cooperation in Oligopoly
  16. When Does Competition Lead to Efficient Investments?
  17. Herding with Costly Observation
  18. Asymmetric Nash Bargaining with Surprised Players
  19. Competing Gatekeepers
  20. Monotone Comparative Statics in Ordered Vector Spaces
  21. Pareto Optima and Competitive Equilibria with Moral Hazard and Financial Markets
  22. Decreasing Relative Risk Premium
  23. Advertising as a Distortion of Social Learning
  24. Pricing Behavior of Multiproduct Retailers
  25. Auctions with Opportunistic Experts
  26. A Consistent Multidimensional Generalization of the Pigou-Dalton Transfer Principle: An Analysis
  27. On the Effect of Risk Aversion in Two-Person, Two-State Finance Economies
  28. Contributions Article
  29. Information Goods Upgrades: Theory and Evidence
  30. Staged Financing with a Variable Return
  31. A Decentralized Market for a Perishable Good
  32. Effective Scrappage Subsidies
  33. Sunspot Rational Beliefs Structures, Equilibria and Excess Volatility
  34. Repeated Auctions with the Right of First Refusal
  35. A Herding Perspective on Global Games and Multiplicity
  36. Bribery and Favoritism by Auctioneers in Sealed-Bid Auctions
  37. Oligopoly, Endogenous Monopolist and Product Quality
  38. When Can Manipulations be Avoided in Two-Sided Matching Markets? -- Maximal Domain Results
  39. Free Cash Flow and Managerial Entrenchment: A Continuous-Time Stochastic Control-Theoretic Model
  40. Collective Punishments: Incentives and Examinations in Organisations
  41. Von Neumann-Morgenstern Stable Set Bridges Time-Preferences to the Nash Solution
  42. Information-Invariant Equilibria of Extensive Games
  43. Contests with Ties
  44. Local Network Effects and Complex Network Structure
  45. Advances Article
  46. Relating Network Structure to Diffusion Properties through Stochastic Dominance
  47. Firm Size, Productivity, and Manager Wages: A Job Assignment Approach
  48. Rule-Based and Case-Based Reasoning in Housing Prices
  49. Market Entry Dynamics with a Second-Mover Advantage
  50. The Compensation Principle and the National Income Test
Sign up now to receive a 20% welcome discount
Institutional Access
How does access work?
Have an idea on how to improve our website?
Please write us.
© 2025 De Gruyter Brill
Downloaded on 27.10.2025 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.2202/1935-1704.1126/html
Scroll to top button