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Dramatic increases in the capabilities of computers and communication networks, accompanied by equally dramatic decreases in cost, have fomented revolutionary thoughts in the scholarly publishing community. This paper concerns a controlled field experiment to investigate the effects of product bundling and pricing structures for electronic access to scholarly literature. We begin by providing background on the market economics of the publishing business, and describe some important economic problems facing both research libraries and scholarly journal publishers. We then explain how the opportunity provided by electronic access to use innovative bundling and pricing structures offer some hope of easing the library and publisher problems. We then describe our utility-theoretic framework for analyzing the consumer response to the trial c...

Dramatic increases in the capabilities and decreases in the costs of computers and communication networks have fomented revolutionary thoughts in the scholarly publishing community. In one dimension, traditional pricing schemes and product packages are being modified or replaced. We designed and undertook a large-scale field experiment in pricing and bundling for electronic access to scholarly journals: PEAK. We provided Internet-based delivery of content from 1200 Elsevier Science journals to users at multiple campuses and commercial facilities. Our primary research objective was to generate rich empirical evidence on user behavior when faced with various bundling schemes and price structures. In this article we report initial results. We found that although there is a steep initial learning curve, decision-makers rapidly comprehended...