We compare a discriminatory pricing regime with a non-discriminatory regime in a competitive bottleneck model where content providers endogenously sort into single or multi-homers. We find that consumer prices rise when the share of single-homers increases in the non-discriminatory case, while...

This essay discusses two immanent challenges for competition policy in online e-commerce markets: the platform character and the role of personalized data. Both phenomena are briefly described from an economic perspective (section 2 and 3) with a focus on how they affect and change competition...

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 markets for audiovisual content are subject to dynamic change. Where once "traditional" (free-to-air, cable, satellite) television was dominating, i.e. linear audiovisual media services, markets display nowadays strong growth of different types of video-on-demand (VoD), i.e. nonlinear...

This paper provides an economic analysis of recent vertical and horizontal mergers in the U.S. industry for audiovisual media content, including the AT&T-Time Warner and the Disney-Fox mergers. Using a theory-driven approach, we examine economic effects of these types of mergers on market...

The world of audiovisual online markets is rapidly changing. Not long ago, it was dominated by linear television, transmitted terrestrially, through cable networks or via satel-lite. Recently, streaming services like Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime and others have emerged as new suppliers of...

We review the economics of superstars, originally developed for stars in traditional media, and discuss whether they are applicable for the (allegedly) novel phenomenon of stars in social media (influencer, micro-celebrities). Moreover, we analyse potentially new factors for creating social...

The anomalous inverse concentration-price relationship observed by some researchers in the newspaper market has been attributed to scale economies. In this paper we suggest that the newspaper's (or magazine's) double-product feature (i.e., news supplied to readers and advertising space supplied...

We study how the presence of a news aggregator affects quality choices of newspapers competing on the Internet. To provide a microfoundation for the role of the aggregator, we build a model of multiple issues where each newspaper chooses quality on each issue. This model captures the...

The success of the Kindle e-book platform and the increased popularity of e-books among members of the reading community have attracted extensive interest in the high-tech industry. New platform providers are jumping in the market to compete for device and e-book sales. In this paper, we model...