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First Monday, July 1997
--- begin forwarded text
Date: Tue, 8 Jul 1997 22:59:42 +0200 (METDST)
From: [email protected]
X-For: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
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 ([email protected]), 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/