This paper develops a model of the daily newspaper industry in order to provide a tentative explanation for the rise of free newspapers. This explanation is based on the growth of net advertising revenues per reader, i.e. of the difference between advertising revenue per reader and unit printing...

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...