Article Title
Cruel, Mean, or Lavish? Economic Analysis, Price Discrimination and Digital Intellectual Property
Abstract
This is an essay about economic analysis, price discrimination, and the world of digital content. In the interest of full disclosure, I should warn the reader that in this Essay I will take a slightly different attitude towards the economic analysis of intellectual property than most, though perhaps not all, of the contributors to this fascinating symposium issue; I will be focusing on economic analysis as a type of rhetoric. By rhetoric, I do not mean bluster, nor do I mean to suggest that economic analysis is merely an apologia for conclusions arrived at for other reasons. I use the term "rhetoric" in a way closer to one of its positive classical senses: something between Aristotle's deliberative rhetoric and the looser sophistic concept, a way of interpreting and understanding "an incomplete, ambiguous and uncertain world." Thus, to focus on economic analysis as a form of rhetoric is not an insult to economic analysis, though it is a signal that I think that the answers it provides are more partial, in both senses of that word, and more indeterminate than many economists and most policy-makers seem to believe. In particular, I will be focusing in this Essay on the way in which some of the most important issues in digital intellectual property policy are decided by a pre-reflective process of categorization from which the analysis flows. Information economics as a discipline does indeed enlarge our understanding of some very important intellectual property questions, but I believe that the answers it offers are, on both empirical and theoretical grounds, much more open than is generally accepted. Indeed, one of its main contributions may be in offering us plot-lines and econo-dramas, ready- made images of types of dysfunction in information markets that sharpen our perceptions of potential risks and benefits. Unfortunately, it tends to offer them in antagonistic and mutually annihilating pairs.