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When I first met my father in law, he spent hours trying to convince me of the cultural superiority of his tastes. Some of these were indeed triumphs. I’m thinking here of “Dr. Strangelove,” “The 400 Blows,” and the music of Richard Wagner. (Others were not. I’m thinking here of “Children of Paradise,” a movie about mimes.) His love of Wagner is curious; he was born in Israel and almost his entire family was murdered in the Warsaw ghetto. This is not a trivial issue. Hitler loved Wagner too, and used his music for political ends. Wagner was himself a hater of Jews. Accordingly, Israel banned public performance of Wagner’s music nearly six decades ago, and the taboo was not broken until 1995 when “The Flying Dutchman” was played on Israeli radio. Six years later Daniel Barenboim (a Jew) led the Berlin Staatskapelle in a performance of an overture from “Tristan und Isolde” at an Israel Festival, which only reignited the controversy.

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The Economist seems to think so, relying on evidence from this new paper by Joel Waldfogel and Ben Shiller.  Waldfogel and Shiller find that, relative to uniform pricing at $.99, alternative pricing schemes including two part tariffs and various bundling schemes could raise producer surplus by somewhere between 17 and 30 percent.  Those are large numbers, which raises the obvious question: why is Apple leaving so much money on the table? Or are they? I doubt it.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education provides a useful summary of the OS-Liebowitz debate on file sharing we’ve been following for a while (thanks to David Glenn for the tip). I like this description of the original piece by Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf…

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I’d have to say the answer is yes (duh). Radiohead’s In Rainbows made a stunning “official” debut, coming out at number 1 on the Billboard chart with 122,000 US sales in the first week.

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The results are in: Radiohead did . . . ok.  Before I share the specifics, let me remind you of what one seemingly prescient prognosticator said a few weeks ago:

My prediction: They will receive an average price of $2 and a median price of $0. 

So what happened?

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This time from Paste Magazine (HT: Peter Schwartz via Wired Blog Magazine), and motivated by the Radiohead Experiment, and with an interesting twist…

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I’ve previously discussed the voluntary pricing strategy taken by restaurants and cafes in a handful of states to offer food and drink for free and allow customers to decide whether and how much they would pay.  I was rather skeptical about the profitability of this strategy in the retail setting. But it looks like we may soon have another datapoint from another industry as the WSJ reports that Radiohead will sell its new album (“In Rainbows”) only as a digital download from its website and allowing fans to choose how much they will pay.

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I started writing this as a comment to Josh’s last post, but it got so long I figured I’d make a post out of it.  Thanks for the inspiration, Josh.

I really hope Radiohead releases the data on its little experiment!  My prediction: They will receive an average price of $2 and a median price of $0.

Read the full piece here.