Publishers don't have a natural monopoly, just a circumstantial monopoly. (Yes I just made that up.)

That produces a completely different implication: Zero marginal cost means that a competitor can come along at any time and charge a zero price. This is the power of advancing information technology: it empowers people with little to no capital & operational budget to have a proportionately huge effect on any information system that has zero marginal cost.

No it doesn't because there are still fixed costs. Even if it costs me the same to send out a software license to the 100th person as it does to the 101st person, I still have to pay to develop the software, pay the rent, the fixed subscription fee of whatever it is I'm using behind the scenes to develop it, host it, etc.

Sure, but do the fixed costs really justify the current pricing? The last paper I submitted, the gold open access fee was $3k... Forget it, we just put the preprint on arXiv, which has no problem hosting versioned preprints at no cost to the authors.

I was really only commenting on the statement "Zero marginal cost means that a competitor can come along at any time and charge a zero price." There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

Can you think of a natural monopoly which isn't circumstantial? Is your model falsifiable?

Natural monopolies have some natural cause, not created by the monopoly or their customers. The classic example is utilities, where one natural cause of monopoly is the high cost of infrastructure discouraging new players (capex), and another is because nobody wants 5 separate power lines running to each house just so we have some competition (regulation).

When I made up "circumstantial monopolies" I was thinking of monopolies that only still exist via circumstances. Like there used to be some regulation or it used to be a natural monopoly causing it to be a true monopoly, but those external reasons have disappeared and they only remain a monopoly because of inertia.

Maybe "inertial monopolies" would have been a better term. It's certainly more amusing.

So my argument is that journals may have had a natural monopoly in the past, and have had an inertial monopoly since, but there's no inherent reason why they still have a monopoly today. Does that help explain?

That's helpful, yes, thank you.

I'm not sure it's convincing, but then I'm not settled on what is so generally. This is a question I've been thinking through heavily.

One model I'm working on is that monopolies are synonymous with economic rents, and derive from network structures, and/or control systems. These might be physical or logical, and would include political control systems, one of the typically sugested forms of "artificial monopolies". I'm not sure that particular distinction is meaningful. It also doesn't seem to be the one you're making.

In the case of extant structures vs. novel ones, which does seem to match your case, there's the question of why an apparrently better or more robust novel system doesn't displace an incumbent. Much of that is seen as a critical mass problem, though viewing it as a critical cohort problem might be more useful: Facebook overtook MySpace by starting and building from a high-appeal, high-value core (Harvard undergraduates). This overcame network effects by seeking individual nodes with a far greater value function both in social and advertiser appeal.

That pattern of overtaking seems repeated among other networks as well. Private jet charters vs. commercial 1st class, even Concorde-speed service, might be another.

For academic publishing, defection of fields, researchers, journals, or specific universities might be a similar mechanism.

Is this in any way along the lines of what you are thinking?

I'm sorry I'm having a hard time extracting a summary/thesis out of your comment.

You seem to trying to explain why it hasn't happened to journals before. The answer to which seems immediately obvious to me. So I'm probably misunderstanding you.

No, most of that was my trying to explain how I'm concieving of monopoly-tending industries and firms -- what characteristics they have. Somewhat inchoate, I'm well aware, though attempts to describe this may help me in formulating the concepts, if not you.

I'd not addressed why journals haven't already been disrupted. I did suggest how they might become disrupted, borrowing on the model of MySpace/Facebook. See also: Newspapers/radio, cinema/television, and radio/television. It's not that the old networks fail, per se, but a new network (that is, monopoly), which delivers on the same need (or want), and does so in ways which bypass the original.

But since you raise the question of why journals haven't been disrupted, part of the point is that they'd emerged as a blocking / gatekeeping mechanism only fairly recently. Peer-review is largely a post-1970 phenomenon, and really largely since 1980.

I'm not entirely sure when journal subscription costs became an issue, though I do recall hearing buzzes about it in the 1980s. The emergence of the Web as an alternate distribution mechanism was already suggesting academic journals were obsolete by the late 1990s, and I was part of early Open Access discussions at the time. I basically see that solution still developing, which suggests there simply hasn't been sufficient time.

Sci-Hub is doing a great deal on the time-sufficiency department.

"It costs nearly nothing to a company working with electric power distribution to serve an additional client in comparison to their fixed costs."

I beg to differ. The infrastructure is only part of the cost (the fixed part). The fuel needed to produce the electricity (or the electricity itself) is the variable part. As a consumer I pay much more for the variable part then for the fixed part, therefore what you say can't be correct.

Why do you say that you pay more for the variable part?

On the UK out bills are two parts. The standing charge, which is the infrastructure rental, and costs the same wherever you draw 100A or 100mA, and the per unit charge. The later makes up the bill of your bill.

If I'm not mistaken, the UK uses price-cap regulation in electricity distribution, which is one where government just sets a maximum per unit price for electricity. The standing charge only pays the cost of maintaining his own individual connection to the network, but the fixed cost of installing and maintaining the distribution network go into everything else in the bill. So an UK's consumer "variable" electricity costs are actually the firm's fixed costs.

At various points both of the large parties have proposed capping energy bills. Not happened yet (the Tories ridiculed labour for proposing it, then a year later proposed it themselves)

We do have a very mobile energy market, switching provider is easy.

There may be price caps on the monopoly parting the system - the connection to the grid - that's because it's a natural monopoly, moreso even that the last mile of fibre from the cabinet to your house.

When politicians mention "capping energy bills", that means trying to cap final consumer tariffs. What I mean by "price-cap" is a regulatory model which determines how governmental contracts for public utility might be written. It's also called the "RPI-X" regulation model.

It does not determine final consumer tariffs directly, but instead establishes a maximum revenue per KWh for the regulated firms. And this model has been in place in the UK's transmission and distribution sectors since 1990.

Also, you cannot choose who distributes energy to you. If you could, the sector wouldn't even need regulation. But you can choose who supplies that energy. These are two different sectors, and they're regulated in different ways. The distribution sector is a natural monopoly, while the energy generation sector isn't.

It costs money to maintain the distribution network to every additional client. But then they are regulated to (theoretically) cost just enough to ensure such goals. If the network is self-maintaining and already serves every client, then that business would be over, too.

It costs much more money to produce the electricity they use!