Strategic Complementarities in a Model of Commercial Media Bias

Anna Kerkhof and Johannes Münster

No 10738, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Media content is an important privately supplied public good. While it has been shown that contributions to a public good crowd out other contributions in many cases, the issue has not been thoroughly studied for media markets yet. We show that in a standard model of commercial media bias, qualities of media content are strategic complements, whereby investments into quality crowd in further investments and engage competitors in a race to the top. Therefore, financially strong public service media can mitigate commercial media bias: the content of commercial media can be more in line with the preferences of the audience and less advertiser-friendly in a dual (mixed public and commercial) media system than in a purely commercial media market.

Keywords: commercial media bias; public service media; advertising two-sided markets; supermodular games; strategic complements; public goods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C70 H41 L13 L51 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth, nep-ind and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp10738.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:ces:ceswps:_10738

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().