This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel statements:
A) Most college professors who assign textbooks would not be able to guess, within 10% of the actual figure, the retail price that their students pay for new copies of those books.
B) Since students can resell college textbooks or rent electronic versions, the net burden on students is substantially lower than retail prices for new textbook purchases would suggest.
C) Even though the professors who select textbooks are different form the people who pay for them, the price of new edition college textbooks reflect classic forces of supply and demand.
Keyword: book market
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This week’s IGM Economic Experts Panel statements:
A: Amazon has monopsony power in the market for books that is significantly reducing the supply of books.
B: Amazon has sufficient monopsony power that regulatory intervention is likely to make consumers of books better off, taking into account implementation costs and the effect of intervention on incentives.
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