News Aggregators and Competition among Newspapers on the Internet

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Jeon, Doh-Shin; Nasr, Nikrooz
• 署名单位: Universite de Toulouse; Universite Toulouse 1 Capitole; Toulouse School of Economics; Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU); Universite de Toulouse; Universite Toulouse 1 Capitole; Toulouse School of Economics
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL-MICROECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1945-7669
• DOI: 10.1257/mic.20140151
• 发表日期: 2016
• 页码: 91-114
• 关键词: media; online; MARKET

摘要

This paper studies how news aggregators affect the quality choices of newspapers competing on the Internet. To provide a micro foundation for the role of the aggregator, we build a model of multiple issues where newspapers choose their quality on each issue. Our model captures well the main trade-off between the business stealing effect and the readership-expansion effect. We find that the aggregator increases the quality only if the readership-expansion effect is large enough relative to the business-stealing effect. Using a condition obtained from empirical results, we find that the aggregator increases the quality and social welfare, but affects newspapers' profits ambiguously.