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For the past two years, researchers in Economics at the University of Michigan have worked in collaboration with the University of Michigan Library to design and run an experiment in Pricing Electronic Access to Knowledge. PEAK is both a production service for electronic journal delivery and an opportunity for experimental pricing research that provides access to the 1,100+ journals published by Elsevier Science--journals that include much of the leading research in the physical, life and social sciences. The project provides an opportunity for universities and other research institutions to have electronic access to a large number of journals, access that allows for fast sophisticated searching, nearly instantaneous document delivery, and new possibilities for subscriptions.

The underlying economic impetus for the experiment is to learn how additional value can be extracted from existing content by means of innovative electronic product offerings and pricing schemes. The research team seeks to determine how users respond to different pricing schemes and assess the additional value created from the different product offerings. The team is also analyzing the impact of the different pricing schemes on producer revenues. The team's aim is to be able to generalize our results to various business models, customer populations and information goods. Finally, we would like to contrast the empirical results with the current conclusions of the economic literature on bundling of information goods.