We examine the impact of the Internet on the leading American recreation activity: watching television. We run a panel regression using television viewing, Internet penetration, and socioeconomic variables for a large number of American cities starting before the birth of the Web. We find that...

The extent to which the Internet has altered traditional leisure activities has received limited academic study. In this paper we use panel data going back to the beginning of web browsing to examine how the Internet impacts the most important recreation activity of Americans: television...

The long tail hypothesis claims that increased Internet usage will enhance the purchase of obscure items so that, in aggregate, these obscure items will become an important, perhaps primary portion of the market. We test this hypothesis with two analyses. First, using unusually rich data on book...

It appears that the Internet is soon going to fulfill its potential to become a giant on-demand repository of television shows (and movies) available asynchronously. As companies such as Netflix and Hulu increase their activities in this sphere, there are many unanswered questions about the...

Researchers have frequently used publicly available data on product ranks to estimate nonpublic sales quantities under the assumption that the distribution of sales follows a power law. Using population sales data for a product frequently thought to follow a power law—books—we find the...