In the 1990s, three Scandinavian news media companies, Bonnier, Kinnevik, and Schibsted, internationalized their newspapers. Despite doing this during the same period, competing in the same industry and institutional environment, being exposed to the same opportunities by the opening of the Eastern European markets, and all belonging to a smaller language area, they differed in their internationalization models as well as in their outcomes. Despite initial successes, Bonnier and Kinnevik eventually discontinued their newspapers in the new markets, in many cases following significant losses, while Schibsted fared better. The main explanation for using different internationalization models was differences in business models, basically striving to do business internationally in a similar way as domestically. That is, they did not choose a specific internationalization model but sought to simply expand their business models internationally. Consequently, this article finds that when researching internationalization, more focus should be placed on business models.

As internet penetration rapidly expanded throughout the world, press freedom and government accountability improved in some countries but backslid in others. We propose a formal model that provides a mechanism that explains the observed divergent paths of countries. We argue that increased access to social media makes partial capture, where governments allow limited freedom of the press, an untenable strategy. By amplifying the influence of small traditional media outlets, higher internet access increases both the costs of capture and the risk that a critical mass of citizens will become informed and overturn the incumbent. Depending on the incentives to retain office, greater internet access thus either forces an incumbent to extend capture to small outlets, further undermining press freedom; or relieve pressure from others. We relate our findings to the cases of Turkey and Tunisia.

In this article, we examine disclosure as a tool to mitigate the effects of asymmetric information in a Thoroughbred yearling market. If disclosures influence market price, information contained therein must be valuable to buyers and hence diminish asymmetric information. Using public auction data, we find that disclosures do not influence price in a segment of the auction in which an implicit quality certification is available. However, in the other segment, we find evidence that some disclosures may provide valuable information to buyers.

L'analyse contenue dans cet article envisage une chaîne publique et une chaîne privée en monopole comme deux hypothèses alternatives concernant la structure du marché télévisuel. Nous comparons les tarifs et les valeurs publicitaires émergeants de ces hypothèses alternatives en supposant les téléspectatrices ont une aversion pour la publicité. Nous montrons que le tarif, sous l'hypothèse d'un monopole public excède le tarif qu'imposerait un monopole privé quel que soit le niveau des coûts fixes de production de la chaîne.

In 1997, the Christie’s sale of 20th century art works from the estate Victor and Sally Ganz netted more than $207 million, a record sum for a single-owner sale of art at auction. The paper presents estimates of the Ganzes’ financial returns from investing in art using records the Ganzes’ kept on the prices they originally paid for the works sold in 1997 and two earlier auctions in 1986 and 1988. Over the period 1948 to 1997 the Ganzes earned real rates of return ranging from 12 to over 21 percent for works sold at the three auctions. Overall, the Ganzes beat-often by a wide margin-the returns from diversified portfolios of common stocks. The empirical evidence shows that the Ganzes were not only lucky but skillful investors as well. Their financial success did not result from a few lucky purchases. They earned consistently high returns, regularly beating the stock market on works by different artists acquired at different time periods. I also found that buyers were willing to pay a price premium for works from the Ganz collection compared to “identical” works sold by others. For example, buyers paid between 25 and 90 percent more for prints from the Ganz collection than for otherwise identical prints. The likely source of this premium is the quality and prestige of the Ganzes’ collection itself not the recently acquired celebrity status of the collectors.

This paper reviews the literature on ticket pricing in the entertainment industry. All along, I try to evaluate whether ticket markets outcomes are consistent with theoretical predictions. Overall, the literature provides a good understanding for observed variations in ticket prices. The literature, however, fails to explain situations where prices do not vary. We have but a poor understanding for why prices often do not vary over the run of a show, why more popular shows do not charge more and why most venues are scaled in just a few sections. I also review the empirical literature of price discrimination in ticket markets. By contrasting the theoretical and the empirical literatures, the paper identifies a set of promising directions for future research.