Jay Pil Choi (Michigan State University – Department of Economics; CESifo) and Byung-Cheol Kim (University of Alabama) have posted The Right to Resell Digital Goods on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Digital goods are typically sold as durable but non-transferable access rights, with digital rights management (DRM) preventing resale. Should policy restore resale rights? In a two-period model, resale insures early buyers and reallocates copies, but diverts future transactions from the platform. Under independent valuations, the platform never prefers an active secondary market, even when it intermediates resale and sets the commission. Mandating transferability alone is ineffective without commission regulation. Commission-free resale can raise consumer surplus but lowers total surplus, making the case for mandated resale redistributive rather than efficiency-based. The consumer-surplus case for resale weakens as valuations become more persistent.
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Lawrence Solum