"In this book, author Min Tang examines the political economy of the China-based leading global Internet giant, Tencent. Tracing the historical context and shaping forces, the book illuminates Tencent's emergence as a joint creation of the Chinese state and transnational financial capital....

An increasingly common practice among media platforms is to provide premium content versions with fewer or even no ads. This practice leads to an intriguing question: how should ad-financed media price discriminate through versioning? I develop a two-sided media model and illustrate that price...

We compare the advertising intensity and content of programming in a market withcompeting media platforms. With pay-tv, media platforms have two sources of revenues,advertising revenues and revenues from viewers. With free-to-air, media platformsreceive all revenues from advertising. We show...

Empirical evidence suggests that producers of information products (TV programs, movies, computer software) may respond to cost-reducing, as well as quality-enhancing technological change by increasing their total production investments in the “first copy” of each product, possibly at the...

Anecdotal evidence suggests that producers of information products (TV programs, movies, computer software) may respond to potentially cost saving technological change by increasing, rather than reducing, their total production investments in the quot;first copyquot; of each product, possibly at...

Two aspects of media bias are important empirically. First, bias is persistent: it does not seem to disappear even when the media is under scrutiny. Second, bias is conflicting: different people often perceive bias in the same media outlet to be of opposite signs. We build a model in which both...

We provide a simple model to investigate decisions on vertical integration/separation. The key feature of this model is that more than one input is required for the final products of the local downstream monopolists. Depending on their cost structure, downstream firms' decisions on vertical...

In this paper, I compare two-part tariff competition to linear pricing in a vertically differentiated duopoly. Consumers have identical tastes for quality but differ in their preferences for quantity. The main finding is that quality differentiation occurs in equilibrium if and only if two-part...