Sharing the Price: Subscription Sharing and Monopoly profits
Abstract: This paper studies whether subscription sharing is profit-enhancing for a monopolist and shows that the answer depends critically on how users divide the subscription price (price-sharing rule). I develop a model in which users may subscribe individually or coordinate in pairs to share a subscription, while the monopolist posts a single price. Sharing affects both the composition and the elasticity of demand. When each partner pays half the subscription price (equitable rule), allowing sharing is never profit-enhancing. Although sharing reduces demand elasticity, subscription losses dominate because a single price cannot simultaneously target individual subscribers and sharing pairs. This result is robust to the prevalence of sharing and to the monopolist's ability to offer subscription menus with perfect enforcement. By contrast, when users split the subscription price according to their willingness to pay (proportional rule), sharing aggregates valuations across pairs and yields joint subscription decisions. In this case, sharing can be profit-enhancing whenever the monopoly price without sharing is sufficiently low, linking the analysis to classic results from the bundling literature. 

Presented at WIPE (2026).

Assignment game and information acquisition