Economic Benefits of Renting Software

In this article, we analyze the economics of a monopoly firm selling and renting a packaged software product by employing an intertemporal monopoly pricing game to model the firm's pricing strategy. The game models the software product as two versions; the first version is available in the first period and the second, a revised version, is available in the second period. The second version benefits from consumer reports of bugs and requests for additional features. This is modeled using delayed network externalities that take effect only in the second period. We observe that the introduction of the rental product in the first period leads to an increase in profits. We also find that the firm's profits are monotonically increasing with the intensity of the network effect. As the intensity of the network effect becomes stronger, the firm chooses to reduce its prices in the first period to expand the size of its network and later increases prices in the second period. Because many of the customers who choose to rent in the first period subsequently make a purchase in the second period, the firm is able to capture the benefits of network externalities in the first period without reducing sales in the second period. For high levels of network intensity, consumer surplus and social welfare are also higher.