This paper presents a theory of the market provision of broadcasting and uses it to address the nature of market failure in the industry. Equilibrium advertising levels may be too low or too high, depending on the nuisance cost to viewers, the substitutability of programs, and the expected benefits to advertisers from contacting viewers. The equilibrium amount of programming may also be below o...

We document the existence of pricing styles in the concert industry. Artists differ in the extent to which they rely on secondand third-degree price discrimination and in how likely they are to sell out concerts. Most strikingly, artists who use multiple seating categories are more likely to vary prices across markets and less likely to sell out concerts. These patterns are difficult to explain...

The business model of commercial-financing relies on advertisers to pay for content. Advertisers will not pay if consumers unbundle the advertisements from the content (advertising bypass). TiVo, remote controls, and pop-up ad blockers are examples of adavoidance technologies. Purchasing such devices causes content providers to increase advertising levels (as has happened recently) because the ...

In this paper, I analyze the trade-off between mimicking and counterprogramming strategies in the payand the advertiser-supported television industries. Two channels compete with respect to both program profile and program quality. I show that profile differentiation is higher under pay-support than under advertiser-support, as a consequence of the inability of channels to compete in price unde...

We study the location of various film-related services (such as camera rental, casting agencies or pyrotechnic services), the main determinant of interest being the human capital specificity. We show that firms which supply services with a lower firm specificity locate farther away from one another, and argue that it can be concluded that the "poaching" argument (fear of employees leaving for a...

I develop a new empirical model for discrete games and apply it to study the release date timing game played by distributors of movies. The results suggest that release dates of movies are too clustered around big holiday weekends and that box office revenues would increase if distributors shifted some holiday releases by one or two weeks. The proposed game structure could be applied more broad...

Television advertising levels in Europe are regulated according to the “Audiovisual Service Media Directive”, where member states of the European Union usually impose stricter regulation on their Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) channels. The present model evaluates the effects of symmetric and asymmetric regulation of ad levels on competition for viewers and advertisers in a duopoly framework...

We model the market for news as a two-sided market where newspapers sell news to readers who value accuracy, and sell space to advertisers who value advert-receptive readers. We show that a monopoly newspaper under-reports or biases news that sufficiently reduces advertiser proÞts, whereas in the duopoly case, newspapers may paradoxically increase accuracy as the size of advertisers grows. We t...

This paper discusses different mechanisms of subsidy allocation invoked by operation of law. We compare the allocation of subsidies via committees to the allocation of subsidies through the reference principle, which binds public support to performance at the box office. The analysis is embedded in a broadly disposed regression analysis of the determinants of the performance of German movies in...

Music industry is “facing the music” now. Big stakeholders try very hard to maintain their positions while other players see opportunities in the advent of peerto-peer networks. Music, as a kind of representative information good, deserves its economic properties to be examined and made explicit. This paper reviews various aspects of the literature covering information goods, tries to extend th...