The Internet has drastically altered the nature of competition in the news industry. This article develops a model of price and quality competition between firms in the online news industry. In equilibrium, firms randomise in their pricing strategies and this generates the cross- sectional...

A country’s human capital and economic productivity increasingly depend on the Internet due to its expanding role in providing information and communications. This has prompted a search for ways to increase Internet adoption and narrow its disparity across countries – the global “digital...

Pricing of Internet access has been characterized by two properties. Parties are directly billed only by the Internet Service Provider (ISP) through which they connect to the Internet and the ISP charges them on the basis of the amount of information transmitted rather than its content. These...

We analyze the linking and versioning strategies of a media firm when facing competition from blogs, search engines and news aggregators. First, we show that when the publisher competes against a blog it is less likely to release a “fighting version” if this generates significant spillovers...

How did the diffusion of the Internet affect performance and product quality in the airline industry? We argue that the shift to online distribution channels has changed the way airlines compete for customers - from an environment in which airlines compete for space at the top of travel...

In this paper, we study how the presence of a news aggregator affects competition among (horizontally differentiated) newspapers in the Internet. For this purpose, we build a model of multiple issues which allows each newspaper to choose quality on each issue. Our model provides a micro...

We consider a heretofore unexplored explanation for why platforms, such as Internet service providers, might impose download limits on content consumers: doing so increases the degree to which those consumers view content providers’ products as substitutes. This, in turn, intensifies the...

The Internet has had profound effects on society, both positive and negative. In this paper we examine the effect of the Internet on a negative spillover: hate crime. In order to better understand the link, we study the extent to which broadband availability affects racial hatecrimes in the US...

How has the Internet affected newspaper content? We build a dataset that matches newspaper readability measures to Internet penetration at the county-year level from 2000 – 2008. We document a positive relationship between Internet penetration and newspaper readability. This result appears...

We discuss the benefits of net neutrality regulation in the context of a two-sided market model in which platforms sell Internet access services to consumers and may set fees to content and applications providers “on the other side” of the Internet. When access is monopolized, we find that...