What do the papers sell?

Matthew Ellman () and Fabrizio Germano

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Abstract: We model the market for news as a two-sided market where newspapers sell news to readers who value accuracy and sell space to advertisers who value advert-receptive readers. We show that monopolistic newspapers under-report or bias news that sufficiently reduces advertiser profits. Newspaper competition generally reduces the impact of advertising. In fact, as the size of advertising grows, newspapers may paradoxically reduce advertiser bias, due to increasing competition for readers. However, advertisers can counter this effect of competition by committing to news-sensitive cut-off strategies, potentially inducing as much under-reporting as in the monopoly case.

Keywords: Two-sided markets; advertising; media accuracy; media bias; media economics. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L13 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-12, Revised 2006-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://econ-papers.upf.edu/papers/800.pdf Whole Paper (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: What Do the Papers Sell?
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:upf:upfgen:800

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).