The Role of Theory in Broadcast Economics: A Review and Development

Concentration in local television markets

“…This is particularly true in commercial broadcasting, where stations operate in one market trading programming for the attention of an audience, and in another market sells that audience to advertisers (Bates, 1987). Some earlier studies have noted this fact, and have considered concentration in different markets (McFadyen, Hoskins, and Cillen, 1980).…”

“…Media markets are also distinctive in that they actually operate in several markets simultaneously (Bates, 1987;Picard, 1989). This is particularly true in commercial broadcasting, where stations operate in one market trading programming for the attention of an audience, and in another market sells that audience to advertisers (Bates, 1987).…”

The Economic Basis for Radio Deregulation

“…Radio markets exhibited characteristics of monopolistic competition as the numbers of stations in markets grew (Albarran, 1996;Bates, 1987;Gomery, 1989;Picard, 1989;Steiner, 1979). However, the loosening restrictions on ownership and of how many stations in a market could be operated by a single broadcaster reawakened concerns about concentration and the abuse of monopoly power (Chan-Olmstead, 1995;Schwartzman & Sohn, 1991).…”

“…The new rules provided incentives for the development of market power within local radio markets by allowing owners to consolidate or cluster groups of stations, and prompted a wave of station trading that still continues. The economics of the broadcasting industries are quite different from those of more typical goods and services (Albarran, 1996;Bates, 1987;Picard, 1989). One of the most distinctive features of the broadcast industry is that it produces a dual product and that broadcasters tend to operate in multiple markets.…”

Transforming information markets: Implications of the digital network economy

“…With the rise of economics and its focus on value, economists began to recognize that there was a problem with this perception, as the value of the information goods was not the same as the value of the physical medium. This fostered the concept of information products as dual goods: the combination of the informational content and the physical media distribution form (Albarran, 2002; Arrow, 1984; Babe, 1995; Bates, 1987; Kingma, 2001; Lamberton, 1971). As people increasingly identified the content with the media form, they tended to ignore the dual goods aspect; they increasingly identified the information content as a component of the physical good, forming the foundation for some of the problematic aspects of basic media and information economics (Bates, 1988, 1990).…”