I provide a full characterization of the quality choice in duopolies with vertical differentiation, without assuming ex-ante if the market is fully covered or not. This will allow to show that covered or uncovered market configurations are endogenous outcomes of firms’ strategic interaction....

We build an oligopoly model of the market of scientific journals that allows us to relate the (in-)efficiency of this market to the exogenous distribution of article quality. Journal quality is endogenously determined by the submission choices of scientists. The efficiency of any stable...

Multihoming – the decision to design a complement to operate on multiple platforms – is becoming increasingly common in many platform markets. Perceived wisdom suggests that multihoming is beneficial for complement providers as they expand their market reach, but it reduces differentiation...

This paper explores panel data on advertising and product pricing for firms in the compact disc player market over the period 1983-92. The data reveal that, for the typical CD player, advertising and price move together, with both rising initially and remaining above introductory levels for...

We study the impact of piracy on the quality choices of a monopolist. In the absence of piracy, the monopolist has no incentive to differentiate its products. With piracy the monopolist might instead produce more than one quality, so that differentiation arises as the optimal strategy. This is...

We analyze the competition between two newspapers in a vertical differentiation model where the qualities of the journals are determined endogenously in the first stage of the game. We show that when the advertising revenues per reader increase there is a critical value above which the quality...

We explore the consequence of quality unpredictability for the welfare benefit of new products, using recent developments in recorded music as our context. Digitization has expanded consumption opportunities by giving consumers access to the "long tail" of existing products, rather than simply...

The economic literature on the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) establishes empirical evidence for culturally-biased voting, more precisely also biases based on geographical closeness, political relations, ethnical and linguistic affinity. The Bundesvision Song Contest (BSC), a similar contest with...

The combination of the digitalization of cultural goods and facilitated cross-border availability through the internet fuels a globalization process that is often said to cause a homogenization of demand across countries, in particular, for entertainment goods as music and movies. In the markets...

In this study, we consider the role of a publicly owned platform and programme quality in the free-to-air broadcasting industry. We compare the equilibrium levels of advertising under private and mixed duopoly competition, and show that the connection between programme quality and advertising...