It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a media company in possession of a good fortune (an audience, brand recognition and decent revenues), must (still) be in want of innovation.The pace of change in our industry means that even the biggest, most successful, companies need to continually...

Digital products have the property that they can be copied almost costlessly. This makes them candidates for non-commercial copying by final consumers. Because the copy of a copy typically does not deteriorate in quality, copying products can become a wide-spread phenomenon - this can be...

We examine cost-reducing investment in vertically-related oligopolies, where firms may be vertically integrated or separated. Analyzing a standard linear Cournot model, we show that: (i) Integrated firms invest more than separated competitors. (ii) Vertical integration increases own investment...

We examine vertical backward integration in a reducedform model of successive oligopolies. Our key findings are: (i) There may be asymmetric equilibria where some firms integrate and others remain separated, even if firms are symmetric initially; (ii) Efficient firms are more likely to integrate...

Although many streams of literature have recognized that firms with broader scope often underperform those with greater focus, relatively little research has examined the mechanisms that might account for these diseconomies of scope. One potential mechanism is that uncertainty shocks |events or...

We compare different methods to assess unilateral merger effects in a two-sided market by applying them to a hypothetical merger in the Dutch newspaper industry. For this, we first specify and estimate a structural model of demand for differentiated products on both the readership and the...

Viewer’s private information consumption generates external benefits for society, because information improves the ability of voters to control politicians. Our study compares two settings in a free-to-air TV market: a differentiated duopoly of private channels and an oligopoly with both...

The aim of this paper is to identify the factors that affect the market penetration of pay television by studying the competition that exists between three types of technology (satellite, cable and ADSL). We distinguish three groups of factors: the level of market competition, the level of...

The Internet provides media firms with an unparalleled opportunity to target advertising towards their consumers. This paper considers how targeted advertising affects different media markets. I show that media firm profits rise and advertising prices rise the most with the ability to target...