Reference

Doh-Shin Jeon, and Domenico Menicucci, “When Is Building a Library Consortium Bene…ficial?”, IDEI Working Paper, n. 791, August 21, 2013, revised April 7, 2014.

Abstract

This paper identifies strategies to build a library consortium from a long term point of view. Contrary to the conventional wisdom to build a consortium around groups of homogenous institutions (Davis, 2002), we find that libraries with similar preferences are likely to lose from building a consortium while libraries with opposite preferences almost always gain from it. Our results suggest a strong tension between a short-term strategy and a long-term strategy as long as the former dictates forming a consortium around libraries with homogenous preferences in order to gain from quantity discounts. This tension might create a "library consortium trap".

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