The role of media – whether television, newspapers, radio, or the Internet – in supplying the ideas that shape our viewpoints and cultures is such that the dangers that may accompany concentrations of ownership in this sector are well recognized. Ownership patterns affect not only pluralism,...

We study the competitive forces which shaped ideological diversity in the US press in the early twentieth century. We find that households preferred like-minded news and that newspapers used their political orientation to differentiate from competitors. We formulate a model of newspaper demand,...

This study examines mergers in two-sided markets using a structural supply-and-demand model that employs data from the 1996-2006 merger wave in the U.S. radio industry. In particular, it identities the conflicting incentives for merged firms to exercise market power on both listener and...

It is well documented that, in the presence of substantial fixed costs, markets offer preference majorities more variety than preference minorities. This fact alone, however, does not demonstrate the market outcome is in any way biased against preference minorities. In this paper, we clarify the...

In this paper, it is analyzed how advertising can affect media diversity when news firms can adapt news to readers’ political preferences. In particular, in the model news firms can choose between a single- and a multi-ideology strategy (a point on the Hotelling line and a line segment,...

We examine the incentives of a monopolistic search engine, funded by advertising, to provide reliable search results. We distinguish two types of search results: sponsored and organic (not-paid-for). Organic results are most important in searches for online content, while sponsored results are...

Given that over half the revenues of global newspaper publishing come from advertising (80% in the US and 57% in OECD countries, OECD, 2010), we study how media firms internalize the effect of their own coverage on advertisers' sales and hence on their own advertising revenues. We show, within a...

This paper develops a structural model of newspaper markets to analyze the effects of ownership consolidation, taking into account not only firms' price adjustments but also the adjustments in newspaper characteristics. A new dataset on newspaper prices and characteristics is used to estimate...

With products differentiated in multiple dimensions, the location equilibrium for a duopolistic market exhibits maximum differentiation in one dimension and minimum differentiation in all the other dimensions. This paper analyses whether this equilibrium arises using real data for the Spanish...

Media industries are important drivers of popular culture. A large fraction of leisure time is devoted to radio, magazines, newspapers, the Internet, and television (the illustrative example henceforth). Most advertising expenditures are incurred for these media. They are also mainly supported...