Academic Journal Prices in a Digital Age: A Two-Sided-Market Model

Abstract

Digital-age technologies promise to revolutionize the market for academic journals as they have other forms of media. We model journals as intermediaries linking authors with readers in a two-sided market. We use the model to study the division of fees between authors and readers under various market structures, ranging from monopoly to free entry. The results help explain why print journals traditionally obtained most of their revenue from subscription fees. The results raise the possibility that digitization may lead to a proliferation of online journals targeting various author types. The paper contributes to the literature on two-sided markets in its analysis of free-entry equilibrium and modeling of product-quality certification.

Keywords: open access, scholarly journal, two-sided market, competition

JEL Classification: L14, L82, D40, L31