Chapter 6. Merger Policy and Regulation in Media Industries

The aim of this chapter is to survey the media economics literature on mergers. In particular, we try to accentuate where the effects of mergers differ between conventional one-sided markets and two-sided media markets (though not all media mergers are within two-sided markets). We focus on price effects in the first part of the chapter, and in the second part we discuss how mergers affect competing media platforms’ choice of genre. In the third part, we discuss how to take on merger control in two-sided media markets. Motivated by some actual merger cases, we also discuss how antitrust authorities might err if they use the conventional one-sided approach to evaluate mergers within media markets (even if a case-by-case assessment is undertaken).