Eighteen years ago Professor Sir Alan Peacock made radical proposals in a report commissioned by the then Government on the future funding of the BBC. Those proposals involved making subscription to the BBC voluntary but providing a fund that would finance public service broadcasting on a...

In the rise in authoritarian trends in Hungary and Poland, public broadcasters are crucial in supporting the political forces in power and the role of private broadcasters or digital media to challenge these dominant narratives is not as significant concerning specific groups of voters, such as...

The deterrent effect of law enforcement rests on the link between the actual and the perceived detection risk. We study the role of word of mouth for this linkage. Our approach makes use of micro data on compliance with TV license fees allowing us to distinguish between households who have been...

The existing literature on "two-sided markets" addresses participation externalities, but so far it has neglected pecuniary externalities between competing platforms. In this paper we build a model that incorporates both externalities. In our setup differentiated platforms compete in advertising...

The British broadcasting system is heavily influenced by public service broadcasting (PSB) concepts and regulation. The debate over PSB has raged for decades and has to varying degrees been based on the proposition that there are myriad market failures in the provision of broadcast television...