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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Librarians And The Terrible Fix: Economics Of The Big Deal, Ted C. Bergstrom
Librarians And The Terrible Fix: Economics Of The Big Deal, Ted C. Bergstrom
Ted C Bergstrom
The academic journal market is characterized by delegated purchasing, unreliable signals of demand, and a complex, difficult-to-evaluate product. As a result, the demand for journals is highly inelastic to prices. Large commercial publishers have capitalized on this inelastic demand, by reducing competition through mergers and consolidations, by offering Big Deal bundled contracts, and raising their prices to levels far above average cost. We suggest that the demand for access to journal articles would be much more price elastic and the overall cost to the academic community would be lower if universities were to abstain from purchasing bundled site licenses at …
Economics In A Family Way, Ted Bergstrom
Economics In A Family Way, Ted Bergstrom
Ted C Bergstrom
This paper is an advertisement for some facts and ideas that I think likely to lead to a richer theory of the economics of the family. The discussion references many papers from anthropology and biology. Because of the intimate connection between the family and reproduction, it should not be surprising that there is much to be learned about the economics of the family from the study of evolutionary biology. Given the increased prevalence in recent decades of unwed parenthood, divorce with sequential monogamy, and ``non-traditional'' family arrangements, it seems that anthropological studies of alternative family structures would help us to …
A Survey Of Theories Of The Family, Ted Bergstrom
A Survey Of Theories Of The Family, Ted Bergstrom
Ted C Bergstrom
This review explores the theory of household technology and the associated possibilities for distributing utility among household members. It also explores decision theory within the household, drawing on standard consumer decision theory. The review discusses models of equilbrium in which families are formed by persons voluntarily choosing mates. This theory is analogous to ``Tiebout theory'' in urban economics, where the objects of choice include not only the amount of public goods supplied in each city, but also which individuals live in each place. An aspect of family life that has fewer parallels in the economics of market economies is intrafamilial …