How the used book market creates value

Hal Varian is one of the few economists whose articles I read regularly. He was the Dean at SIMS, while I was teaching there, and writes a regular column for the New York Times. Today’s column is about used book sales, and how that impacts Amazon. When Jeff Bezos launched used book sales at Amazon, there were dire warnings that this would cut into sales of new books. Hal’s analysis shows that any losses to publishers are more than offset by gains to consumers, and to Amazon’s bottomline. Go here to read the whole article.