Economists have long debated the degree to which inventive and artistic activities were either the result of instinctual urges on the part of creators, or the responses of creators to potential pecuniary rewards. Copyright and patent laws are based on a view that rewards are an important factor....

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...

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...