Intermediaries in Two-Sided Markets: An Empirical Analysis of the US Cable Television Industry

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Boik, Andre
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Davis
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL-MICROECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1945-7669
• DOI: 10.1257/mic.20140167
• 发表日期: 2016
• 页码: 256-282
• 关键词: competition; mergers

摘要

Local television stations are platforms in a two-sided market connecting advertisers and viewers. This paper explicitly examines the effect that important intermediaries (such as cable, telephone, and satellite distributors) may have on a platform's pricing behavior in a two-sided market. I find that stations raise their fees to cable distributors because stations prefer that viewers access their content through satellite distributors with whom they do not compete in the local advertising market, and that station mergers lower stations' fees to distributors by partially internalizing a pricing externality that results from the mandatory bundling of local content.