The Eurovision Song Contest is one of the worldwide biggest live media events and the world's leading broadcast of an international music competition. The countries of the European Broadcasting Union participate by sending an artist (or a group of artists) to the contest and both expert juries...

In the context of the WTO, intellectual property rights (IPR) are codified in the TRIPS-agreement. While covering all the different types of IPR, landmark cases of the still young history of TRIPS have dealt with commercial copyrights. This paper summarizes the basic economics of the IPR branch...

Newspapers have been experiencing declining circulation figures and diminishing advertising revenues for several years - both effects might pose a threat to the continuing existence of (print) newspapers. In an earlier paper, Lindstädt & Budzinski (2011) argued from a theoretical viewpoint that...

Newspapers have been experiencing declining circulation figures and advertising revenues for several years. Declining advertising figures, in particular, pose a threat to newspapers - this is especially severe in the U.S. where 73 per cent of newspapers' revenues are generated through...

The economic literature on the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) establishes empirical evidence for culturally-biased voting, more precisely also biases based on geographical closeness, political relations, ethnical and linguistic affinity. The Bundesvision Song Contest (BSC), a similar contest with...

There are numerous studies analyzing factors of success in media-broadcasted artistic contests, especially music competitions. However, one factor that is generally neglected in the literature is the quality of the artistic performances (i.e. "music quality"). In this paper, we approach this...

We review the economics of superstars, originally developed for stars in traditional media, and discuss whether they are applicable for the (allegedly) novel phenomenon of stars in social media (influencer, micro-celebrities). Moreover, we analyse potentially new factors for creating social...

The markets for audiovisual content are subject to dynamic change. Where once "traditional" (free-to-air, cable, satellite) television was dominating, i.e. linear audiovisual media services, markets display nowadays strong growth of different types of video-on-demand (VoD), i.e. nonlinear...

This paper provides an economic analysis of recent vertical and horizontal mergers in the U.S. industry for audiovisual media content, including the AT&T-Time Warner and the Disney-Fox mergers. Using a theory-driven approach, we examine economic effects of these types of mergers on market...

There is a considerable amount of literature analyzing factors of success in music contests, in particular those where the audience votes for the winner. However, one factor that is highlighted by the economic theory of stardom is generally neglected in the literature. In this paper, we tackle...