We explore the sensitivity of the U.S. government's ongoing incentive auction to multi-license ownership by broadcasters. We document significant broadcast TV license purchases by private equity firms prior to the auction and perform a prospective analysis of the effect of ownership...

Theory predicts that in markets with increasing returns, the number of differentiated products and resulting consumer satisfaction grow in market size. We document this phenomenon across 246 US radio markets. By a mechanism that we term 'preference externalities', an increase in the size of the...

Perceptions of Anglo-American dominance in movie and music trade motivate restrictions on cultural trade. Yet, the market for another cultural good, food at restaurants, is roughly ten times larger than the markets for music and film. Using TripAdvisor data on restaurant cuisines, along with...

In the past few years, YouTube and other sites for sharing video files over the Internet have vaulted from obscurity to places of centrality in the media landscape. The files available at YouTube include a mix of user-generated video and clips from network television shows. Networks fear that...

When a product's product provision entails fixed costs, it will be made available only if a sufficient number of people want it. Some products are produced and consumed locally, so that provision requires not only a large group favoring the product but a large number nearby. Just as one has an...

Both asymmetric information (AI) and divergent expectations (DE) theories offer possible explanations of the litigation puzzle. Under DE, cases proceed to trial when, by chance, the plaintiff is more optimistic than the defendant. As the fraction of cases tried (T) declines, this leads to a...

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...

What determines employee preferences for unionizing their workplaces? A substantial literature addresses this question with surveys on worker attitudes and pay. Unionization drives at the Universities of Minnesota and Washington have given rise to open letters of support or opposition from over...

Recent technological changes may have altered the balance between technology and copyright law for digital products. While file-sharing has reduced revenue, other technological changes have reduced the costs of bringing creative works to market. As a result, we don't know whether the effective...

In the decade since Napster, file-sharing has undermined the protection that copyright affords recorded music, reducing recorded music sales. What matters for consumers, however, is not sellers' revenue but the surplus they derive from new music. The legal monopoly created by copyright is...