Empirical models of differentiated product demand are widely used by both academics and practitioners. While these methods treat carefully the potential endogeneity of price, until recently they have assumed the number and characteristics of the products offered by firms are exogenous. This...

Technological change is transforming creative media industries. Digitisation lowers recording, storage, reproduction and distribution costs, while computer-based editing facilitates higher quality and special effects. With electronic distribution a vast range of content can be made available to...

We present an economic model of media bias and media mergers. Media owners have political motives as well as profit motives, and can influence public opinion by withholding information that is pejorative to their political agenda - provided that their agenda is not too far from the political...

We measure how the bundling of television channels affects welfare. We estimate an industry model of viewership, demand, pricing, bundling, and input market bargaining using data on ratings, purchases, prices, bundles, and input costs. We conduct simulations of à la carte policies that require...

This article provides a review of recent literature in economics on the effect of mass media on politics. The focus is on the welfare effects of mass media. I also discuss the likely implications of existing behavioral theories of media effects, developed outside of economics.

This paper develops a new insight enabling the empirical study of media capture: minority shareholders of newspapers and readers face similar risks. Both are adversely affected when corrupt insiders use the newspaper for personal profit and receive invisible revenues. This means that relevant...

How much influence can news providers exert on the political process? This paper defines the power of a media organization as its ability to induce voters to make electoral decisions they would not make if reporting were unbiased. While existing media concentration measures are built by...

The paper examines incentives for exclusive distribution of premium television content such as live sports and Hollywood movies. Static analysis shows that a pay TV operator with premium content always chooses to supply its retail rival, using per-subscriber fees to soften competition....

Auction houses use both in-house and third-party guarantees for sellers who are concerned about the risk that not enough bidders will enter the auction for their works. Auction houses are compensated for guarantees by buyers’ commissions and successful sales after attracting important works of...

We establish the existence of strong media slant against foreign owners. Using a unique data set from nation-wide distributed quality newspapers in Germany, we find that a foreign firm that downsizes in Germany receives almost twice as much attention than a domestic firm. This quantitative slant...