The first decade of the new millennium has been the decade of digital distribution for media products. All products that can be digitized have either been affected, or will soon be. Since the early days of the Internet, piracy has emerged as an important threat to media firms. But new technology...

Although revenue for recorded music has collapsed since the explosion of file sharing, results elsewhere suggest that the quality of new music has not suffered. One possible explanation is that digitization has allowed a wider range of firms to bring far more music to market using lower-cost...

We ask whether international firms compete by designing products attractive to customers because they are objectionable to others. We investigate “discriminatory product differentiation” among international airlines through depictions of Israel on online route maps and availability of kosher...

Existing studies of the impact of conviction on income and employment do not consider life cycle issues. We postulate that conviction reduces access to career jobs offering stable, long-term employment. Instead, conviction relegates offenders to spot market jobs, which may have higher pay at the...

In May 1996 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Rhode Island's ban on advertising prices of alcoholic beverages, making Rhode Island the subject of a natural experiment for measuring the impact of advertising on prices. Using Massachusetts prices as controls, we find that while advertising stores...

We present empirical techniques that are both familiar to students of industrial organization and useful for modeling of media markets. We first focus on demand estimation with discussion of various discrete choice models. We then turn to estimation of the demand for advertising. We next turn to...

Media industries typically exhibit two fundamental features, high fixed costs and heterogeneity of consumer preferences. Daily newspaper markets, for example, tend to support a single product. In other examples, such as radio broadcasting, markets often support multiple differentiated offerings....