Supports: Econ (Chapter 12 – Oligopoly: Firms in Less Competitive Markets (Section 14.2); Essentials: Chapter 11 – Monopolistic Competition and Oligopoly (Section 11.6)
Solved Problem: Pricing Video Games
In November 2020, an article on bloomberg.com discussed the pricing of video games for consoles like PlayStation and Xbox. The article noted that firms selling video games had kept prices constant at $60 per game since 2005. But this stable price was about to change: “This week, video game publishers will press ahead with an industry-wide effort to raise the standard price to $70.” An article in the Wall Street Journal indicated that the number of people playing video games has been increasing and had reached 244 million in the United States and 3.1 billion worldwide in 2020. Answer the following questions assuming that the video game industry is an oligopoly.
a. Is it likely that the demand for video games and the cost of producing them have remained constant for 15 years? If not, what can explain the fact that the prices of video games remained constant from 2005 to 2020?
b. Given your answer to part a., what can explain the fact that the prices of video games increased by $10 in 2020? Does the fact that this increase was an “industry-wide effort” matter? Briefly explain.
Sources: Olga Kharif and Takashi Mochizuki, “Video Game Prices Are Going Up for the First Time in 15 Years,” Bloomberg.com, November 9, 2020; and Sarah E. Needleman, “From ‘Fall Guys’ to ‘Among Us,’ How America Turned to Videogames Under Lockdown,” Wall Street Journal, October 31, 2020.
Solving the Problem
Step 1: Review the chapter material. This problem is about pricing in an oligopolistic industry, so you may want to review Chapter 14, Section 14.2 “Game Theory and Oligopoly.”
Step 2: Answer part a. by discussing whether it’s likely that the demand for video games and the cost of producing them have remained constant for 15 years and by providing an alternative explanation for the prices of video games remaining constant over this period. Over such a long period, it’s unlikely that the demand for video games and the cost of producing them have remained constant. For one thing, the Wall Street Journal article indicates that the number of people playing video games has been increasing, reaching 244 million in the United States in 2020 (out of a U.S. population of about 330 million). The cost of producing most consumer electronics has declined over the years. Although we are not given specific information that the cost of producing video games has followed this pattern, it seems probable that it did. So, it’s unlikely that the reason that the prices of video games have remained constant is that the demand for video games and the cost of producing them have remained unchanged.
The problem tells us to assume that the video game industry is an oligopoly. We know that price stability in an oligopolistic industry can sometimes be the result of the firms in the industry finding themselves in a prisoner’s dilemma. In this situation, the most profitable strategy for a firm is to match the low price charged by competitors even though the firm and its competitors could, both as a group and individually, earn larger profits by all charging a higher price. It seems more likely that the firms in the video game industry were stuck for years in a prisoner’s dilemma than that they have faced unchanged demand and production costs over such a long period.
Step 3: Answer part b. by explaining why the prices of video games increased by $10 in 2020, taking into account that the increase was an “industry-wide effort.” As we note in the textbook, the prisoner’s dilemma is an example of a noncooperative equilibrium in which firms fail to cooperate by taking actions—in this case raising the prices of video games—that would make them all better off. Firms have an incentive to increase their profits by switching to a cooperative equilibrium of charging $10 more for video games by implicitly colluding to do so. Explicitly colluding by having firms’ executives meet and agree to raise prices is against the law in the United States and Europe. But implicit collusion in which firms signal to each other—perhaps by talking about their plans with journalists—that they intend to raise prices is a gray area of the law that governments may not take action against. The fact that the bloomberg.com article states that the price increase was an “industry-wide effort” is an indication that video game firms may have implicitly colluded to raise video game prices by $10.
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