Affiliation:
1. University of Chicago Booth School of Business, 5807 S. Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637, and NBER (e-mail: )
2. Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 3620 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104 (e-mail: ).
Abstract
We study the competitive forces which shaped ideological diversity in the US press in the early twentieth century. We find that households preferred like-minded news and that newspapers used their political orientation to differentiate from competitors. We formulate a model of newspaper demand, entry, and political affiliation choice in which newspapers compete for both readers and advertisers. We use a combination of estimation and calibration to identify the model's parameters from novel data on newspaper circulation, costs, and revenues. The estimated model implies that competition enhances ideological diversity, that the market undersupplies diversity, and that optimal competition policy requires accounting for the two-sidedness of the news market. (JEL D72, K21, L13, L41, L82, N42, N72)
Publisher
American Economic Association
Subject
Economics and Econometrics
Cited by
99 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献