Study Of The Economics Of The Software Industry

With the development of economy, the share of software industry in our economy is increasing dramatically, and it has become one of the most important industries of our country. Each government of our country has paied much attention to the development of software industry, not only have given many preferential policies, but also enacted several laws to support and regularize the development of software industry. However, the research of software industry's economic theory is lagging in our country, many researches just focus on one area or are very superficial, lacking systemic and embedded research. On the contrary, there are many pertinent and systemic researches in software industry abroad, not only research in the product function, cost function, economy of scale and so on from the perspective of classical economics, but also in the market structure, firm conduct, and so on from the theory of industrial organization. Based on these literatures, this thesis has researched several main problems from the perspective of network effects which is applied the theory of industrial organization.The structure of this paper is arranged as follows:Part I is Chapter I, which introduce the theory development, research status in quo and the main theory literatures in software industry, and gives the author's research perspective that is network effects. Besides this, the author points out that the research method can't apply mechanically the previous researches that focused on other network industries and all researches should be done selectively and creatively based on the particularity of software industry.Part II is from Chapter II to Chapter V. First, the author uses the former research to unify the network effects function of software industry, and removes the research obstacle caused by the various network effects of different software. Then, based on the particularity of software industry, the author researches and introduces the compatibility, piracy and market segmentation problems and so on. Finally, this thesis researches the market structure of software industry from the perspective of network effects, and points out that monopoly is the development trend of software...