Tourism accounts for around one tenth of global GDP. We analyze the impact of entertainment media in drawing tourists to filming locations (media multiplier ) and, in turn, the effect of tourism on local economic development (tourism multiplier ). To assess the media multiplier, we employ a...

In this paper we build a formal model to study market environments where information is costly to acquire and is of use also to potential competitors. In such situations a market for information may form, where reports - of unverifiable quality - over the information acquired are sold. A...

This paper reports on experiments testing the viability of markets for cheap talk information. We find that the poor quality of the information transmitted leads to a collapse of information markets. The reasons for this are surprising given the previous experimental results on cheap-talk games....

We investigate the strategies of a data intermediary selling consumer information to firms for price discrimination purpose. We analyze how the mechanism through which the data intermediary sells information influences how much consumer information she will collect and sell to firms, and how...

The purpose of this article is to analyze how competitive forces may influence the way media firms like TV channels raise revenue. A media firm can either be financed by advertising revenue, by direct payment from the viewers (or the readers, if we consider newspapers), or by both. We show that...

Standard media economics models imply that increased platform competition decreases ad levels and that mergers reduce per-viewer ad prices. The empirical evidence, however, is mixed. We attribute the theoretical predictions to the combined assumptions that there is no advertising congestion and...

This paper explores the causal influence of media content on voting behavior. We exploit a natural experiment involving access to West German TV within the German Democratic Republic. Focusing on federal and state election outcomes in the post-reunification decade (i.e., a time at which TV...

We construct a Hotelling-type model of two media providers, each of whom can issue fake and/or real news and each of whom can invest in the debunking of their rival's fake news. The model assumes that consumers have an innate preference for one provider or the other and value real news. However,...

This paper presents an empirical test for the hypothesis that US news coverage of al-Qaeda causes al-Qaeda attacks. To isolate causality, disaster deaths worldwide provide an instrumental variable crowding out al-Qaeda coverage. Studying daily al-Qaeda coverage by CNN, NBC, CBS, and Fox News, as...

We investigate the welfare effects of third-degree price discrimination by a two-sided platform that enables interaction between buyers and sellers. Sellers are heterogenous with respect to their per-interaction benefit, and, under price discrimination, the platform can condition its fee on...