Media

In the United States, the Golden Age of the public network, in which substantial universal service coincided with group substantial monopoly, was as brief and romanticized as the cowboy era; it lasted about twenty years from 1950, but in the mid-1960s centrifugal forces began their assault. The departure from the public school system cannot be explained primarily by the supply of new options or by new technology but rather by an increased demand to exit. In a similar sense, recent centrifugal development in independent electric power generation had very little to do with new technology.

On search keywords with trademarked terms, the brand owner ("focal brand") and other relevant firms compete for consumers. For the focal brand, paid clicks have a direct substitute in the organic links below the paid ad(s). The proximity of this substitute depends on whether competing firms are bidding aggressively to siphon off traffic. We study the returns to focal brands and competitors using large-scale experiments on Bing with data from thousands of brands.

In incentive-aligned choice experiments, each decision is realized with some probability, Prob. In three eye-tracking experiments, we study the impact of varying Prob from 0 (as in purely hypothetical choices) to 1 (as in real-life choices) on attention, information processing, and choice. Consistent with the bounded rationality literature, we find that as Prob increases from 0 to 1, consumers process the choice-relevant information more carefully and more comprehensively.

The rise of "Big Data" had a big impact on marketing research and practice. In this article, we first highlight sources of useful consumer information that are now available at large scale and very little or no cost. We subsequently discuss how this information — with the help of new analytical techniques — can be translated into valuable insights on consumers' psychological states and traits that can, in turn, be used to inform marketing strategy.

We examine the Internet’s impact on the cross-border distribution of cultural goods and assess its implications for cultural policy and cultural diversity. We present a stylized model of a two-country economy where governments are endowed with political preferences over the consumption of domestic content and enact import barriers and subsidies to protect it. We introduce peer-to-peer file sharing as a distinct distribution channel enabled by the Internet that provides access to all media products at a low cost. We report two main findings.

The article shows that outside ownership of media moves in stages -- from media properties as the mouthpiece for personal and business interests, to a second stage of conglomerates seeking economic “synergies” of performance, to a third stage dominated by financial portfolio diversification. These phases of outside media ownership correspond to the stages of economic development in that country.The article finds that in rich countries, the ownership of media by industrial companies as a way to create political influence has been declining.

We exploit the release of a mobile application for a financial aggregation platform to analyze how technology adoption changes consumer financial decision making. The app reduced the cost of accessing personal financial information, and we find that this led to a drop in non-sufficient fund (NSF) fees. Because of the manner in which these fees are incurred, this represents an unambiguous welfare improvement for users of the platform. The leading explanation for this result appears to be mistake avoidance due to easier access to information.

Patents have long been assumed to provide firms with competitive advantage, but longitudinal results suggest that some types of patent content provide more enduring advantage than others do. The duration of advantage appeared to wane with time in the highly-dynamic U.S. communications-services industry during a period when technological changes occurred rapidly within it (1998–2012).

Today’s media landscape affords people access to richer information than ever before, with many individuals opting to consume content through social channels rather than traditional news sources. Although people frequent social platforms for a variety of reasons, we understand little about the consequences of encountering new information in these contexts, particularly with respect to how content is scrutinized.