I think you grossly overestimate the ability of most large businesses to behave rationally form an organizational profit maximization perspective. It would just as likely or even more likely be something like personal wealth maximization by an employee or group of employees, personal relationship improvement, ego gratification, maintaining/improving social standing, effort minimization, etc.
This is even more so for a monopoly rights holder like La Liga.
Do you have any evidence for this?
> I think you grossly overestimate the ability of most large businesses to behave rationally form an organizational profit maximization perspective.
You're free to think this but it doesn't really square with common sense. Profit maximization is a stated goal of large orgs, and by definition they're doing ok at it.
In any case, your comment does nothing to diminish OP's point: that the shape of the demand matters. What the shape of the demand is in this case is an empirical question and you haven't provided any evidence.
With that said, I have no guarantee that these companies are leaving money on the table. We also have no guarantee that they aren't. The best you are going to be able to do is create a model. Models are not reality. Models use assumptions. You're making two huge assumptions. One, that the models assumptions are correct. Two, the people interpreting the model are doing it correctly. Humans are imperfect, we make imperfect models, those models are interpreted by other imperfect humans. Making concrete statements either way is silly in my opinion.
Edit: Hacker News, plz, it's not that complex guys :-) one person willing to pay $1000000000000000 is better than 100 people willing to pay $1
Disclaimer: I don't pirate, and I sure as hell don't steal.
If nobody pays but everything else keeps costing money, there won't be any new digital goods. So you can't say there's an infinite supply of digital goods.
This is not necessarily true. It depends entirely on the shape of demand. By way of simplified example, imagine that there are two types of consumers equally distributed: those willing to pay $1000 and those willing to pay $100. Unless you can distinguish at time of payment between these users and charge them different prices (without possibility of resale), you will always be better off forgoing half of the market and charging only the higher price.
It's possible that the business has estimated things incorrectly and is acting suboptimally, but I think it's as least as likely that they are maximizing profits the way we'd expect a rational business operator to do.