Software Upgrades Under Monopoly

We study price discrimination in a monopolistic software market. The monopolist charges different prices for the upgrade version and for the full version. Consumers are heterogeneous in taste for infinitely durable software and there is no resale. We show that price discrimination leads to a higher software quality but raises both absolute price and price per quality. This price discrimination does not increase sales and it decreases the total number of consumers compared to no discrimination. Finally, such discrimination decreases consumers' surplus but increases the developer's profit and social welfare that attains the social optimum in the limit