--- begin forwarded text Date: Tue, 8 Jul 1997 22:59:42 +0200 (METDST) From: lm@webhotel.uni-c.dk X-For: rah@shipwright.com To: rah@shipwright.com Subject: First Monday, July 1997 Mime-Version: 1.0 Dear First Monday Reader We proudly announce the July Issue of First Monday: http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_7/odlyzko/ Fixed fee versus unit pricing for information goods: competition, equilibria, and price wars by Peter Fishburn, Andrew M. Odlyzko, and Ryan C. Siders http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_7/drelichman/ Efficient Pricing in Data Transmission Networks: The Argentine experience by Mauricio Drelichman http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_7/goldhaber/ What's the Right Economics for Cyberspace? by Michael H. Goldhaber http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_7/berentsen/ Digital Money, Liquidity, and Monetary Policy by Aleksander Berentsen http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_7/almeida/ WebMonitor: a Tool for Measuring World-Wide Web Server Performance by Jussara M. Almeida, Virgilio Almeida, and David J. Yates http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_7/hibbitts/ E-Journals, Archives and Knowledge Networks: A Commentary on Archie Zariski's Defense of Electronic Law Journals by Bernard Hibbitts http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_7/bookrev/ Working the Web's Global Community: new books ---------------------------------------------------- http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_7/odlyzko/ Fixed fee versus unit pricing for information goods: competition, equilibria, and price wars by Peter Fishburn, Andrew M. Odlyzko, and Ryan C. Siders Information goods have negligible marginal costs, and this will create possibilities for novel distribution and pricing methods. The main concern of this paper is with pricing of goods that are likely to be consumed in large quantities by individuals. For example, will software continue to be sold at a fixed price for each unit, or will it be paid for on the basis of usage? There is substantial evidence both from observing marketplace evolution and from surveys that customers overwhelmingly prefer subscription pricing. It turns out that even if we ignore this factor, per-use pricing is not a clear winner, and therefore when the preference effect is taken into account, subscription pricing is likely to dominate. We model competitive pricing between two companies that supply essentially equivalent services (such as movies or word processing software). One company charges a fixed fee per unit, while the other charges on a per-use basis. Each is interested in maximizing its revenue. We consider instances of the models that have stable competitive equilibria between suppliers along with situations that are unstable and, in the absence of collusion, lead to ruinous price wars. ---------------------------- http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_7/drelichman/ Efficient Pricing in Data Transmission Networks: The Argentine experience by Mauricio Drelichman This paper develops a model to reflect the Argentine market for end-user Internet access and draws conclusions on certain aspects of economic efficiency. After the Introduction, the second section, entitled A Simple Model, provides a descriptive analysis of the market and its related industry, deriving a stylized technology and setting up a basic model. The third part of the paper, An Application to the Argentine Market, applies the model to Argentina, while the fourth section, Lessons from a Linear Demand Case, examines the results of the model under certain conditions. The model and the linear demand case are fully developed in the Appendix. ------------------------- http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_7/goldhaber/ What's the Right Economics for Cyberspace? by Michael H. Goldhaber Which economic theory best describes what goes on on the Internet? If you believe as I do that the explosive growth of the net and its relatives will likely continue until they become the dominant arenas for human effort and involvement, this is no idle question. Theories are guides to action: sticking to the wrong one can lead to ruin; adopting the right one opens the path to success. ------------------------- http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_7/berentsen/ Digital Money, Liquidity, and Monetary Policy by Aleksander Berentsen The term digital money refers to various proposed electronic payment mechanisms designed for use by consumers to make retail payments. Digital money products have the potential to replace central bank currency, thereby affecting the money supply. This paper studies the effect of replacing central bank currency on the narrowly defined stock of money under various assumptions regarding regulatory policies and monetary operations of central banks and the reaction of the banking system. ---------------------- http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_7/almeida/ WebMonitor: a Tool for Measuring World-Wide Web Server Performance by Jussara M. Almeida, Virgilio Almeida, and David J. Yates Server performance has become a crucial issue for improving the overall performance of the World-Wide Web. This paper describes WebMonitor, a tool for evaluating and understanding server performance, and presents new results for realistic workloads. WebMonitor measures activity and resource consumption, both within the kernel and in HTTP processes running in user space. WebMonitor is implemented using an efficient combination of sampling and event-driven techniques that exhibit low overhead. Our initial implementation is for the Apache World-Wide Web server running on the Linux operating system. We demonstrate the utility of WebMonitor by measuring and understanding the performance of a Pentium-based PC acting as a dedicated WWW server. Our workloads use file size distributions with a heavy tail. This captures the fact that Web servers must concurrently handle some requests for large audio and video files, and a large number of requests for small documents, containing text or images. Our results show that in a Web server saturated by client requests, up to 90% of the time spent handling HTTP requests is spent in the kernel. These results emphasize the important role of operating system implementation in determining Web server performance. It also suggests the need for new operating system implementations that are designed to perform well when running on Web servers. ------------------- http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_7/hibbitts/ E-Journals, Archives and Knowledge Networks: A Commentary on Archie Zariski's Defense of Electronic Law Journals by Bernard Hibbitts In his First Monday article "Never Ending, Still Beginning: A Defense of Electronic Law Journals from the Perspective of the E-Law Experience", Professor Archie Zariski asserted that, despite recent musings to the contrary, electronic legal periodicals have a bright future in the age of the Internet. This article challenges that contention, arguing that in law as in other disciplines, the reach, dynamism and interactivity of the Internet offer opportunities for the development of new scholarly publishing paradigms - in particular, archives and "knowledge networks" - which have the potential to enrich and envigorate legal learning more than even the most progressive electronic legal journals. --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/