Publication

The Impact of Sharing Markets on Product Durability

Thomas Alois Weber, Maryam Razeghian Jahromi
2016
Report or working paper
Abstract

This paper studies the effects of sharing markets on the prices for new products and on product design in terms of durability. In a dynamic economy with overlapping generations, consumers take strategic purchasing decisions, anticipated by a durable-goods monopolist. Without sharing, the optimal durability increases in the production cost. In the presence of sharing, a producer prefers to limit durability for low-cost products, effectively disabling a secondary sharing market. However, all else equal, a peer-to-peer economy never decreases the incentives to provide durability.

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Related concepts (32)
Marginal cost
In economics, the marginal cost is the change in the total cost that arises when the quantity produced is incremented, the cost of producing additional quantity. In some contexts, it refers to an increment of one unit of output, and in others it refers to the rate of change of total cost as output is increased by an infinitesimal amount. As Figure 1 shows, the marginal cost is measured in dollars per unit, whereas total cost is in dollars, and the marginal cost is the slope of the total cost, the rate at which it increases with output.
Durability
Durability is the ability of a physical product to remain functional, without requiring excessive maintenance or repair, when faced with the challenges of normal operation over its design lifetime. There are several measures of durability in use, including years of life, hours of use, and number of operational cycles. In economics, goods with a long usable life are referred to as durable goods. Product durability is predicated by good repairability and regenerability in conjunction with maintenance.
Cost curve
In economics, a cost curve is a graph of the costs of production as a function of total quantity produced. In a free market economy, productively efficient firms optimize their production process by minimizing cost consistent with each possible level of production, and the result is a cost curve. Profit-maximizing firms use cost curves to decide output quantities. There are various types of cost curves, all related to each other, including total and average cost curves; marginal ("for each additional unit") cost curves, which are equal to the differential of the total cost curves; and variable cost curves.
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