Media content is an important privately supplied public good. While it has been shown that contributions to a public good crowd out other contributions in many cases, the issue has not been thoroughly studied for media markets yet. We show that in a standard model of commercial media bias,...

Media content is an important privately supplied public good. While it has been shown that contributions to a public good crowd out other contributions in many cases, the issue has not been thoroughly studied for media markets yet. We show that in a standard model of commercial media bias,...

Film studios occasionally withhold movies from critics before their release. These cold openings provide a natural setting to apply laboratory-developed models of limited strategic thinking to the field. In a set of 1303 widely released movies, cold opening is correlated with a 10-30 percent...

This paper deals with the video game console market. We are not interested here in portable consoles nor in PC games. Our work focuses on the role of core competencies in console wars, analyzing the way these competencies are activated within the firms' business models. The home console market...

Today, many platforms rely on contributions by users to create value. While they play an increasing role in today's digital economy, little is known about how dominant user-driven platforms emerge and what determines the production of content here. We aim to extend our understanding of this...

Film studios occasionally withhold movies from critics before their release. Since the unreviewed movies tend to be below average in quality, this practice provides a useful setting in which to test models of limited strategic thinking: Do moviegoers seem to realize that no review is a sign of...

Scholars have long recognized the difficulties of communicating risk to the public. The rise of mobile gaming presents unprecedented opportunities for risk communicators to reach millions of potential users in engaging and potentially effective ways. Gamifying risk communication may help users...

We consider a Bayesian persuasion problem where a sender's utility depends only on the expected state. We show that upper censorship that pools the states above a cutoff and reveals the states below the cutoff is optimal for all prior distributions of the state if and only if the sender's...

Why do people who normally refrain from committing illegalities become digital pirates? In this paper we use a theoretical model of digital piracy combined with a game-theoretic mechanism of social norm formation to argue that no social stigma is attached to digital piracy because the latter has...

The “freemium” model for digital goods involves selling a base version of the product for free, and making premium product features available to users only on payment. The success of the model is predicated on the ability to profitably convert free users to paying ones. Price promotions (or...