A paper co-written by faculty members of the University of Connecticut School of Business Department of Operations and Information Management has been nominated as the best ACM TMIS paper of 2010 and is also one out of five recipients of the Best IS Publications of the Year Awards 2010.  The paper, titled “Why Give Away Something for Nothing? Investigating Virtual Goods Pricing and Permission Strategies,” was co-written in December 2010 by Dr. Sulin Ba, Professor; Dr. Dan Ke; Dr. Jan Stallaert, Associate Professor; and Zhongju Zhang, Associate Professor.

The Best Publications Awards were established to recognize the breadth of high quality work that is being published in the Information Systems discipline. This award was designed to bring outstanding papers across a range of journals to the attention of the IS community, and to give due credit to the journals in which they are published. Each year journal editors nominate the best paper published in their journal in the preceding year. A committee composed of Senior Scholars reviews the nominations from journal editors and selects five papers as the recipients of this prestigious award.

“Why Give Away Something for Nothing? Investigating Virtual Goods Pricing and Permission Strategies” is about the world of virtual goods.  The question of how a creator sets prices for a virtual good, as to maximize their profit, is discussed.  The major difference with virtual goods is that many times consumers will want to use multiple copies of the same good, which results in an increase in the consumer’s utility.  The focus of the research is on the copy permission of virtual goods.  An economic model is developed and examined under different conditions, to find which setting is best for the copy permission that leads to the highest profit, as well as how subsequent pricing strategies are affected.  Both theoretical and practical implications of researched are discussed within the paper.