4. Conclusion
Unlike the traditional offline products, digital content products can be offered free because the marginal cost is close to 0, and advertising revenue can be raised based on secured consumers. However, there is some dissent among researchers regarding the optimal pricing strategy for digital content providers. In fact, firms in reality use various pricing policies. The present study categorized the digital content firms into three groups based on the pricing 15 strategy and estimated each group’s efficiency value using SFA. The estimation results showed that the mix group that uses both free and fee strategies had the highest average efficiency value, whereas the group that uses free strategy had the lowest average efficiency value. The limitation of traditional efficiency measurement methods is that it is unable to compare the efficiencies of groups that use different production functions. Therefore, TGR and TE* values were estimated using MFA. The comparison of efficiency values of three groups based on the meta-frontier production function showed opposite results. The TGR and TE* values of the free group were the highest, whereas the TGR and TE* values of the mix group, which had the highest TE value, were the lowest.
