The Bad Economist

Shockingly, Economists Price Things Intelligently May 27, 2013

I was excited to see that there’s a new edition of Recursive Macroeconomic Theory by Lars Ljungqvist and the Nobel Prize winning Tom Sargent. I was even more excited to see prices starting to fall into place with respect to the Kindle edition.

Textbooks are a special product because demand for them has historically been inelastic: if you need the book, you need it. You won’t have any choice as far as whether to buy it. That’s led price-sensitive consumers to buy used textbooks, but there’s a limited supply. (Of course, even more price-sensitive consumers download the books illegally.) There’s also a pretty big market in old editions, even though there are usually slight differences between editions.

Recursive macro is a pretty standard subject, and although the third edition of Ljungqvist and Sargent includes new material, it probably won’t appreciably change the experience for a first-year grad student taking grad macro. There’s some benefit to the new edition, sure, but many students will be faced with the following choice: Pay $82.44 (as of today) for a new third edition, or pay $49.99 for a second edition. That’s a significant savings. However, second-edition sales aren’t beneficial to the publisher, so how can they create an incentive for price-sensitive buyers to give money to the publishers rather than to the secondary market?

Well, a Kindle version of the third edition is $51.29. Even price-sensitive students would probably find $1.30 a fair price to pay for an up-to-date edition, assuming they already had a Kindle-equipped device like an iPad. As used copies of the third edition accumulate, the prices of those will probably collect around the $50 mark as well, and if they don’t, I’d expect the price of the Kindle version to float along with that. Make it easy on price-sensitive consumers to give you money instead of giving it to the secondary market, and some of them will.