Media

We examine the association between CEO reputation (proxied by the extent of press coverage) and the quality of the firm's earnings (proxied by two accruals-based measures). We test three explanations for an association between these constructs: the efficient contracting hypothesis suggests that reputed CEOs are associated with good earnings quality, while the rent extraction and matching explanations argue that reputed CEOs are associated with poor earnings quality.

I quantitatively measure the interactions between the media and the stock market using daily content from a popular Wall Street Journal column. I find that high media pessimism predicts downward pressure on market prices followed by a reversion to fundamentals, and unusually high or low pessimism predicts high market trading volume.

This paper examines the preferences of advice seekers for human information sources. We focus on the case in which advice providers can be people with high or low technical expertise (high in technical knowledge) and/or socially connected (connected to many others). Somewhat contrary to intuition, information sources who are high on social connectivity are shown to be relatively more attractive for more innovative products. Consistent with this, a meta-analysis indicates that the correlation between knowledge and opinion leadership is indeed lower for more innovative products.

Bias in the market for news is well-documented. Recent research in economics explains the phenomenon by assuming that consumers want to read (watch) news that is consistent with their tastes or prior beliefs rather than the truth. The present paper builds on this idea but recognizes that (i) besides "biased" consumers, there are also "conscientious" consumers whose sole interest is in discovering the truth, and (ii) consistent with reality, media bias is constrained by the truth. These two factors were expected to limit media bias in a competitive setting. Our results reveal the opposite.

The regulation of the television system will not fade away. Nor will it become a new-style "converged" regulation that amalgamates various media. Instead, It will simply shift to the newer underlying delivery pathway, the telecom (and cable) infrastructure on which the broadband internet is riding. Television regulation will therefore end up resembling in many important respects old-fashioned telecom-style regulation, and the present debate over net-neutrality is a harbinger of more to come.

Idea generation (ideation) is critical to the design and marketing of new products, to marketing strategy, and to the creation of effective advertising copy. However, there has been relatively little formal research on the underlying incentives with which to encourage participants to focus their energies on relevant and novel ideas. Several problems have been identified with traditional ideation methods. For example, participants often free ride on other participants' efforts because rewards are typically based on the group-level output of ideation sessions.

The consumer electronics industry has been flat for several years. Hopes are now being pinned on the emergence of home networks. The theory goes that if consumers were able to "internetwork": that is, connect all their gadgets—from televisions to personal computers to digital video players to phones and anything in between—they would rush out to buy new toys and devices.

What is the effect of liberalizing a country's broadcasting system on the level of information of its citizens? To analyze this question, we first construct a model of state monopoly broadcasting where the government selects the amount of television news coverage of different public policy outcomes, and then sets public policy and political rents. Voters vote retrospectively given the news provided. In equilibrium, the incumbent provides some news coverage, and more so to groups for which reducing policy uncertainty is more important.