Academic, trade, and popular publications commonly assert that 80 percent of motion pictures fail to make a net profit, suggesting also that the main players of the motion picture industry operate in highly volatile market conditions. More importantly, major film companies use this argument to...

In sections one to three of this paper, we interrogate the relatively new Irish policy concept of the ‘smart economy' by relating and comparing it to recent theories engaging with the characteristics of the changing industrial economy. This summary review includes concepts such as New Economy,...

This article argues that communication scholars should collaborate with pluralist economists rather than traditional ones, as alternative economic theories are better suited to understanding the evolution of communication industries and to integration into multidisciplinary theoretical...

In this paper we propose a more positive and useful reading of the cost disease. We present a case for refocussing the general attention from the characteristics of the cost disease (i.e. the widening production cost and price gap between the product of progressive and stagnant industries) to...

This article explains that the most important aspect of W. J. Baumol's idea of cost disease is the fundamental intuition that there are some types of labor's contributions that are irreplaceable by new technologies. These contributions are indentified as “creative inputs”: original ideas,...