Economics of an Information Intermediary with Aggregation Benefits
Information Systems Research
Designing a Family of Development-Intensive Products
Management Science
A model of the dynamics of the market of COTS software, in the absence of new entrants
Information Systems Frontiers
Information Goods and Vertical Differentiation
Journal of Management Information Systems
Delayed multiattribute product differentiation
Decision Support Systems
Economics of shareware: How do uncertainty and piracy affect shareware quality and brand premium?
Decision Support Systems
Analysis of pricing strategies for e-business companies providing information goods and services
Computers and Industrial Engineering
Research Note---When Is Versioning Optimal for Information Goods?
Management Science
Versioning and Piracy Control for Digital Information Goods
Operations Research
Information Systems Research
Soft Computing - A Fusion of Foundations, Methodologies and Applications
Information Goods vs. Industrial Goods: Cost Structure and Competition
Management Science
Computers and Industrial Engineering
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Versioning is a widely adopted differentiation strategy in information technology industry. This paper investigates the optimality of versioning strategies of information products in a monopolist market with two-dimensional product quality and various customer distributions. A niching steady-state genetic algorithm (Niching SSGA) is adopted to obtain numerical solutions for analytically intractable optimization problems. Our experiments show that the three-version scheme is more profitable than the one-version scheme when an information product is differentiated along two independent quality dimensions, while the one-version scheme is more profitable when only one quality dimension is considered. In addition, we study three types of customer distributions, namely, the uniform distribution, the exponential distribution, and the Gaussian distribution. Our investigation verifies that the customer distribution has a significant impact on the optimality of the versioning strategy of information products in a two-dimensional vertical differentiation model. This issue has not been investigated yet either analytically or numerically. Moreover, when the highest-quality version is exogenously priced higher than the optimal price in the one-version scheme, the multiple-version strategy is more profitable and has a greater market coverage as well.