Focuses on the relationship between market structure and monopoly power. Durability models; New-used goods model; Durability and monopoly in the new-used model; Interdependence between market structure and durability. (Из Ebsco)

A CADEMIC JOURNALS have played an increasingly important role in the dissemination of scientific information throughout this century, particularly during the last decade.1 This fact is no less true in economics than in other disciplines. The number of journals has also increased greatly in recent decades. For these and other reasons, several recent efforts have been made to judge the various qualities and merits of individual journals. Besides being a rather enjoyable form of naval-gazing for those within a given discipline, such activities also provide valuable information. Where articles are published can affect one's promotion, tenure, and salary at one's present job; it can also affect one's brand name and the ability to change jobs. The purpose of this study is to provide a ranking of journals based on their relative influences on the writings of academics, either within the economics profession or in the world at large.2 The measurement used to create this ranking, described in detail below, is the number of citations that authors make to articles appearing in various journals. After a brief discussion of several previous studies, we proceed to a more complete explanation of our procedures and results.

In a recent issue of this Review, Janusz Ordover and Robert Willig present a model of the provision of journals to libraries and individuals. While the provision of journals is itself of interest to academics, the concepts presented have ready extension to a broad class of quasi-public goods. Ordover and Willig treat journals as shared which means that some copies are consumed privately, while others are consumed collectively in libraries. Libraries face one subscription price, individuals another. It is readily recognized that libraries are not necessarily harmful to publishers' profitability, since collective consumption means that more people can be served at any given output. If publishers can appropriate a sufficient share of the value created by library use, they will benefit from collective consumption. Ordover and Willig's treatment of journal pricing incorporates increasing returns to scale in publishing, and the time or inconvenience costs that some readers face in using the library as opposed to using private subscriptions. They argue that because the amount of library use follows from a subscription price that is not equal to marginal cost, library user fees will enhance efficiency in this setting. While the concept of sometimes shared goods is an interesting one, and one which may be useful in some contexts, the model presented by Ordover and Willig imposes implicit and explicit assumptions which cannot be maintained for discussions of policy. This is especially important since their paper makes strong claims of policy relevance and practicality. Even without those claims, these restrictions preclude correspondence of the model to anything in the real world. The restrictions imposed by Ordover and Willig are of two sorts. First, they impose severe restrictions on the demands facing libraries. Second, they ignore all transactions costs except the one which is responsible for all of their results. We maintain that the ignored costs could well be larger than the one that they recognize. We proceed as follows: Section I outlines elements of the model which are essential to our presentation. Section II presents some simple analytics of the type of user fees considered by Ordover and Willig, introduces the policy implications that they draw, and provides the first indication that their results might depend on rather stringent assumptions. Section III demonstrates that the model requires an assumption that the ranking of libraries by willingness to pay is invariant over the domains of a number of key parameters and that this invariance assumption imposes severe restrictions on consumer demands. Section IV discusses restrictions which are fairly explicit in the model, but which are as important as the hidden ones in establishing policy irrelevance. The problems considered in this section are further restrictions on demand and Ordover and Willig's inconsistent treatment of transaction costs.

We examine the impact of the Internet on the leading American recreation activity: watching television. We run a panel regression using television viewing, Internet penetration, and socioeconomic variables for a large number of American cities starting before the birth of the Web. We find that the Internet's effect on television viewing varies by age group, reducing it by a moderate amount for the youngest Americans but having no impact on the viewing of the oldest Americans. We hypothesize that the overall effect is likely to increase over time as older age groups have more experience with the Internet's recreational opportunities.