Price Discrimination in the Subscription Market for Economics Journals

We examine what factors affect the degree of price discrimination for an academic journal by analyzing data on 190 of the 208 economics journals indexed in the 2008 edition of Journal Citation Reports. We find that (1) the library-to-individual price ratio of a for-profit journal is 37% higher than that of a comparable non-profit journal because the price premium of a for-profit journal in the library market is disproportionately larger than that in the individual market, (2) journals with higher citations per page or impact factor are more price discriminatory, and (3) Elsevier and Wiley-Blackwell practice the highest degree of price discrimination of all publishers