We present empirical techniques that are both familiar to students of industrial organization and useful for modeling of media markets. We first focus on demand estimation with discussion of various discrete choice models. We then turn to estimation of the demand for advertising. We next turn to...

Media industries typically exhibit two fundamental features, high fixed costs and heterogeneity of consumer preferences. Daily newspaper markets, for example, tend to support a single product. In other examples, such as radio broadcasting, markets often support multiple differentiated offerings....

Copyright protection grants creators monopolies – with their attendant harms – in order to provide incentives for continued creation. File sharing, which exploded with Napster’s appearance in 1999, effectively weakened copyright protection. Researchers have documented depressing effects of...

We analyze the behavior of game-show contestants who play a one-shot game called Friend or Foe. While it is a weakly dominant strategy not to cooperate, almost half the contestants on the show choose to play "friend." Remarkably, the behavior of contestants remains unchanged even when stakes are...

The selection hypothesis of Priest and Klein explains the selection of cases for trial, from the underlying population of filed cases, based on the position of the legal standard, the degree of stake asymmetry, and the predictability of trial outcomes. This paper develops implications of the...

Regulators are responding to growing platform power with curbs on platforms' potentially biased exercise of power, creating urgent needs for both a workable definition of platform bias and ways to detect and measure it. We develop a simple equilibrium framework in which consumers choose among...

Libraries have traditionally provided free communal access to books, facilitated by the first sale doctrine's (FSD) guarantee that libraries may purchase physical books at consumer prices. Increasingly restrictive ebook access terms may imperil libraries, and we compare the welfare cost of...

The first decade of the new millennium has been the decade of digital distribution for media products. All products that can be digitized have either been affected, or will soon be. Since the early days of the Internet, piracy has emerged as an important threat to media firms. But new technology...