The Benefits of Diverse Preferences in Library Consortia
研究发现，偏好相似的图书馆组建联盟可能受损，而偏好多样的图书馆则能获益，因为多样化偏好加剧了出版商之间的竞争，这一结论也适用于其他受预算约束的买方群体。
We study the case in which a library consortium increases the aggregate payoff of the member libraries. We find that libraries with similar preferences are likely to lose from building a consortium and that those with diverse preferences are likely to gain by doing so. Combining libraries with diverse preferences implies that their valuation for different publishers' journals is more symmetric, which intensifies competition among publishers for scarce combined budgets. A tension between short term and long term considerations might generate a ‘library consortium trap.’ Our insight can be applied to other buyer groups as long as competition is generated by buyers' budget constraints.