Media Competition on the Internet1

This paper presents a model of broadcast competition with free entry when broadcasters are nanced both from advertisers and viewers. The relation between advertising receipts and sales receipts, which are both complementary and antagonist, is dierent if broadcasters impose a price or a quantity to advertisers. Entry is always larger in an advertising price setting game. We establish a relationship between the equilibrium levels (advertising and entry) and the advertising technology. In particular, with constant return to scale in the audience, entry is not aected by advertising and consumers are better o.

European Economic Review, 2001

We examine a price competition game between two intermediaries offering to match two sides of a market on the Internet. Competition is characterized by asymmetric network externalities.We account for some specificities of cybermediation, in particular access vs usage pricing and the possibility of using the services of several intermediaries. When only registration fees are used and agents register with at most one cybermediary, there exists an equilibrium where one firm corners the market with positive profits. Introducing either fees that are contingent on successful matching or the possibility of registration with two cybermediaries cancels the profit for equilibria where only one cybermediary receives all the demand. Other types of equilibria are discussed.

2005

(cont.) provides explanations as to when and how incorporating them into advertising deals can be profitable. We argue that using these pricing models appropriately can give both the publisher and the advertiser proper incentives to make non-contractible efforts that may improve the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. It also allows the publisher and the advertiser to share the risk caused by uncertainty in the product market.

Journal of Economics, 2011

This paper studies the strategic relationship between a specialized communication medium and a product market. To that end, we formulate a model of informative advertising and price competition where the advertising fee is endogenously determined by the interaction between two firms producing a horizontally-differentiated good and a communication platform. We find that (i) when the subscription to the medium is free, the platform asks for high prices for its advertising services, which allows firms to raise their prices to the level where the marginal potential consumer achieves zero utility and (ii) a positive subscription fee generates cross-side externalities between the firms and subscribers, which can increase or decrease the equilibrium advertising fee. In particular, under a positive advertising externality, the platform tends to charge low advertising fees, thus triggering strong price competition between firms. We also show that less product differentiation or a lower consumer valuation of the goods can increase firms' profits, so a strategic connection between the product and the media markets can substantially affect the functioning of a differentiated product market.

We analyze strategic interactions between two competing distributors of an independent TV channel. Consistent with most of the relevant markets, we assume that the distributors set enduser prices while the TV channel sets advertising prices. Within this framework we show that the distributors have incentives to internalize the fact that viewers dislike ads on TV, but no incentives to internalize how the TV-channel's profits from the advertising market are affected by end-user prices. This leads to some surprising results. First, we show that even undifferentiated distributors might make positive profits. Second, a TV channel might find it optimal to commit to not raising advertising revenue. Third, regulation of the advertising volume might be welfare improving even if the unregulated advertising level is too low from a social point of view. JEL-Code: L100.

International Journal of Industrial Organization, 2012

Standard media economics models imply that increased platform competition decreases ad levels and that mergers reduce per-viewer ad prices. The empirical evidence, however, is mixed. We attribute the theoretical predictions to the combined assumptions that there is no advertising congestion and that viewers single-home. Allowing for crowding in viewer attention spans for ads may reverse standard results, as does allowing viewers to multi-home.

Economics Letters, 2000

Traditional and modern mass media -such as television, newspapers, magazines, and Internet sites -typically derive the bulk of their revenues from advertisements rather than subscriptions. We present a simple model that explains this phenomenon. (JEL Numbers: D4, D8, M3, L13.

Netnomics, 2001

This paper examines the emerging position of the Internet as an advertising medium. The nature and time path of its evolution is subject to considerable uncertainty arising from issues relating to expansion of the Internet's penetration of households; consumer demand for information; development of pricing policies and measurement capabilities; and its attractiveness to advertisers in different product/service categories. Our analyses of these issues suggest that its long-term impact on intermedia rivalry will be broad and substantial. The Internet is emerging as an adaptive, hybrid medium with respect to the factors hypothesized to affect intermedia substitutability, namely, audience addressability, audience control, and contractual flexibility. Possessing such capabilities, it looms as a potential substitute or complement for all of the major categories of existing media and appears capable of serving a wide range of communications objectives for a broad array of advertisers.

2009

The purpose of this article is to analyze how competitive forces may influence the way media firms like TV channels raise revenue. A media firm can either be financed by advertising revenue, by direct payment from the viewers (or the readers, if we consider newspapers), or by both. We show that the scope for raising revenues from consumer payment is constrained by other media firms offering close substitutes. This implies that the less differentiated the media firms' content, the larger is the fraction of their revenue coming from advertising. A media firm's scope for raising revenues from ads, on the other hand, is constrained by how many competitors it faces. We should thus expect that direct payment from the media consumers becomes more important the larger the number of competing media products.

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 2020

We examine competition between two Internet Service Providers (ISPs), where the first ISP provides basic Internet service, while the second ISP provides Internet service plus content, i.e., enhanced service, where the first ISP can partner with a Content Provider to provide the same content as the second ISP. When such a partnering arrangement occurs, the Content Provider pays the first ISP a transfer price for delivering the content. Users have heterogeneous preferences, and each in general faces three options: (1) buy basic Internet service from the first ISP; (2) buy enhanced service from the second ISP; or (3) buy enhanced service jointly from the first ISP and the Content Provider. We derive results on the existence and uniqueness of a Nash equilibrium, and provide closed-form expressions for the prices, user masses, and profits of the two ISPs and the Content Provider. When the first ISP has the ability to choose the transfer price, then when congestion is linear in the load, it is never optimal for the first ISP to set a negative transfer price in the hope of attracting more revenue from additional customers desiring enhanced service. Conversely, when congestion is sufficiently super-linear, the optimal strategy for the first ISP is either to set a negative transfer price (subsidizing the Content Provider) or to set a high transfer price that shuts the Content Provider out of the market.