Do larger markets offer better products? The question has implications both for theories of cities and for theories of market organization. We document that in the restaurant industry, where quality is produced largely with variable costs, the range of qualities on offer increases in market...

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...

Although revenue for recorded music has collapsed since the explosion of file sharing, results elsewhere suggest that the quality of new music has not suffered. One possible explanation is that digitization has allowed a wider range of firms to bring far more music to market using lower-cost...

The objective of this paper is to document the evolution of cross-border music trade patterns in this transition period and to explain what drives digital music trade patterns. The shift from analogue to digital music distribution has substantially reduced trade costs and has enlarged the choice...

This paper introduces a market based methodology for evaluating the performance of MBA programs. We seek to distinguish the quality of a program from the quality of its students. We judge a program's performance by its value added, measured by the graduates' salaries, after accounting for...

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...

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...