In our ongoing study to evaluate the antiprotozoal activity of alkamides from Asteraceae, a dichloromethane extract from the roots of Anacycluspyrethrum L. showed a moderate in vitro activity against the NF54 strain of Plasmodium falciparum and against Leishmaniadonovani (amastigotes, MHOM/ET/67/L82 strain). Seven pure alkamides and a mixture of two further alkamides were isolated by column chr...

We examine whether there is systematic evidence that the US intelligence services pandered to their political masters when constructing intelligence estimates during the Cold War. We construct a model which shows how career concerns on the part of intelligence analysts could lead them to distort reports towards their president’s prior beliefs. We then take the model’s prediction that errors in ...

Does Reality TV Induce Real Effects? On the Questionable Association Between 16 and Pregnant and Teenage Childbearing* We reassess recent and widely reported evidence that the MTV program 16 and Pregnant played a major role in reducing teen birth rates in the U.S. since it began broadcasting in 2009 (Kearney and Levine, American Economic Review 2015). We find Kearney and Levine’s identification...

We analyse optimal pricing and quality of a monopolistic journal and the optimality of open access in a two-sided model. The predominant aspect of the model that determines the quality levels at which open access is optimal is the nature of the (non-linear) externalities between readers and authors in a journal. We show that there exist scenarios in which open access is a feature of high-qualit...

In the movie industry habit, the demand of exploitation windows next to theatres is usually related to the success in cinemas, which is assumed to orient subsequent consumption among audience. Using a data base made of 1035 movies broadcast in peak time by the six main Italian networks during the period 1993-2002, we regress movies’ tv audience outcome on several independent variables as the at...

This paper examines how the ability of media firms to engage in targeted advertising has changed with increased competition from online channels. We find that the use of the Internet by magazine readers, as well as the availability of companion websites, increase the value of targeted advertising. This indicates a complementarity between offline and online media with respect to targeting. We pr...

Chung and Cox (1994) provided an intuitively appealing stochastic model which indicates that superstars may exist regardless of talent and which gives rise to the Yule distribution. We adopt a different empirical approach and test its goodness-of-fit using a parametric bootstrap and several powerful test statistics. Just like the discrete Pareto distribution, it is overwhelmingly rejected: it i...

Proliferation of content on the internet offers consumers access to more sources than had been possible with traditional media. Disaggregated content also increases the relevance of targeting for advertisers. But at the same time, search costs increase the role of intermediaries in media consumption in ways that are poorly understood. This paper studies the effects of search technology and aggr...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how different types of demand structure affect firms’ optimal pricing and private copy protection (DRM) level of digital products. We construct a model where the equilibrium prices and protection levels are dependent upon the two parameters: public copy protection of digital products and degree of compatibility of DRM in terms of hacking technology. W...

This paper investigates the upcoming business model of online streaming services allowing music consumers either to subscribe to a service which provides free-of-charge access to streaming music and which is funded by advertising, or to pay a monthly flat fee in order to get ad-free access to the content of the service accompanied with additional benefits. Both businesses will be launched by a ...