Magazine Subscription and Intertemporal Discounting: Some Further Evidence

The paper’s objective is to assess price discrimination in magazine subscriptions in the Brazilian market. Oster and Scott-Morton (2005) had advanced a price discrimination mechanism in which the ratio between subscription and newsstand prices would be positively associated to the extent that a magazine provides long-term benefits. The present conservative application, in a market where subscription is much less widespread, does not provide support for that form of price discrimination after controlling for different characteristics of the magazines in the econometric analysis. Nevertheless, an exploratory analysis based on principal components suggests that a multidimensional price discrimination mechanism that is composed of price and advertising discounts may be occurring.