Content providers rely on advertisers to pay for content. TiVo, remote controls, and pop-up ad blockers are examples of ad-avoidance technologies that allow consumers to view content without ads, and thereby siphon off the content without paying the ‘price.’ We examine the content...

Payment card associations offer both debit and credit cards and, until recently, engaged in a tie-in on the merchant side through the so-called honour-all-cards (HAC) rule. The HAC rule came under attack on the grounds that the credit and debit card markets are separate markets and that the...

Though new media has become a popular source of information, it is less clear whether or not they have a real impact on economic activity. In authoritarian regimes, where the traditional media are not free, this impact might be especially pronounced. We study consequences of blog postings of a...

It is well known in personnel economics that firms may improve the quality of their workforce by offering performance pay. We analyse an equilibrium model where worker productivity is private information and show that the gains to the firms from worker self-selection may not be matched by a...

The price-aggressive discount format, popularized by chains such as Aldi and Lidl, is very successful in most Western economies. Its success is a major source of concern for traditional supermarkets. Discounters not only have a direct effect on supermarkets’ market shares, they also exert...

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...

Producers of cultural goods and media products can only make their specific contents available to their audiences and readerships through a particular language. The choice of language is a trivial decision if consumers are monolingual. However, the fraction of bilingual consumers is high in some...

This Paper provides an empirical examination of third-degree price discrimination in the Swedish newspaper industry. The results show that price discrimination is more prevalent in competitive markets and among newspapers with low market shares. This supports predictions from recent theoretical...

Reducing fixed cost duplication - a common justification for concentrated market structure - motivated the US government to relax the number of radio stations a firm could operate in any local market. After deregulation the number of firms per market decreased. The implied cost saving depends on...