From: Paul Courant <[log in to unmask]> Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 08:01:47 -0500 Joe, you state the following: So the question could better be put this way: What is the retail price for all the subscription journals (that are available in electronic form), and how much would a customer actually have to pay for them? I can imagine discovering the retail price for all of the subscription journals that are available in electronic form. It would be hard to do, for the reasons that people on this list have adduced. In thousands (tens of thousands?) of cases the prices aren’t posted, and the ingenious sampling idea that Kathleen Folger and others on the list have proposed suffers from the possibility that journals with posted prices differ in some systematic way from journals without them. But your second question simply cannot be answered in any general way via any imaginable research project. It is well-documented that journal publishers engage in price discrimination and the range of prices for an institutional subscriptions is large. (Ted Bergstrom and a number of others, including me, have a paper on this subject in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper is behind a pay well, but is available free from Ted’s website. Go to http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/jpricing.html and scroll down until you see a link that says “here is a link to the paper.”) Michigan pays different prices than Minnesota and both pay different and much higher prices than institutions that are farther down the Carnegie classification scheme. So you have to identify the customer when you ask what "a customer would actually have to pay," and there is no way around this. There simply is no well-defined market price of many journals. Paul ---- Paul N. Courant Harold T. Shapiro Professor of Public Policy Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, Professor of Economics, and Professor of Information The University of Michigan