This paper empirically analyzes how the use of vertical price restraints has impacted retail prices in the market for e-books. In 2010, five of the six largest publishers simultaneously adopted the agency model of book sales, allowing them to directly set retail prices. This led the Department of Justice to file suit against the publishers in 2012, the settlement of which prevents the publishers from interfering with retailers’ ability to set e-book prices. Using a unique dataset of daily e-book prices for a large sample of books across major online retailers, we exploit cross-publisher variation in the timing of the return to the wholesale model to estimate its effect on retail prices. We find that e-book prices for titles that were previously sold using the agency model decreased by 18 percent at Amazon and 8 percent at Barnes & Noble. Our results are robust to different specifications, placebo tests, and synthetic control groups. Our findings illustrate a case where upstream firms prefer to set higher retail prices than retailers and help to clarify conflicting theoretical predictions on agency versus wholesale models.

中文翻译：

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电子书定价和纵向约束

本文从经验上分析了垂直价格限制的使用如何影响电子书市场的零售价格。2010年，六家最大的出版商中有五家同时采用了图书销售代理模式，从而可以直接设定零售价格。这导致司法部在2012年对出版商提起诉讼，该和解协议阻止出版商干预零售商设定电子书价格的能力。我们使用主要在线零售商的大量电子书的每日电子书价格的独特数据集，在恢复批发模式的时间中利用跨出版商的差异来估计其对零售价格的影响。我们发现，以前使用代理模式售出的图书的电子书价格在亚马逊下降了18％，在Barnes＆Noble下降了8％。我们的结果对不同的规格，安慰剂测试和合成对照组均具有鲁棒性。我们的研究结果说明了上游企业倾向于选择较高的零售价格比零售商和帮助澄清相互矛盾的代理与批发模型理论预测。