Advertising and Media Markets

3 units

This course explores current research on policy questions in advertising and media markets. We will address questions such as: How does advertising impact competition in product markets? Does advertising make consumers better or worse off? How are different advertising markets organized? How can antitrust authorities encourage competition among online advertising and media platforms? What is the impact of file sharing/streaming for content producers? How does the introduction of ad-supported subscription tiers affect content offerings? We will learn tools used in the empirical industrial organization (IO) literature, including game theoretic models of imperfect competition, entry, auctions, and antitrust, and will read research papers that employ statistical and empirical methods of analysis using data on advertising and media markets.