TY  - JOUR
AU  - Danaher, Brett
AU  - Dhanasobhon, Samita
AU  - Smith, Michael D
AU  - Telang, Rahul
TI  - Understanding Media Markets in the Digital Age: Economics and Methodology
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 19634
PY  - 2013
Y2  - November 2013
DO  - 10.3386/w19634
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19634
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19634.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Brett Danaher
Chapman University
1 University Dr
Orange, CA 92866
E-Mail: danaher@chapman.edu

Samita Dhanasobhon
Carnegie-Mellon University
E-Mail: samita@gmail.com

Michael D. Smith
Carnegie Mellon University
E-Mail: mds@cmu.edu

Rahul Telang
Carnegie Mellon University
4800 Forbes ave
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
E-Mail: rtelang@andrew.cmu.edu
M1  - published as Brett Danaher, Samita Dhanasobhon, Michael D. Smith, Rahul Telang. "Understanding Media Markets in the Digital Age: Economics and Methodology," in Avi Goldfarb, Shane M. Greenstein, and Catherine E. Tucker, editors, "Economic Analysis of the Digital Economy" University of Chicago Press (2015)

M3  - presented at "The Economics of Digitization: An Agenda", June 6-7, 2013
AB  - Digitization raises a variety of important academic and managerial questions around firm strategies and public policies for the content industries, with many of these questions influenced by the erosion of copyright caused by Internet file-sharing. At the same time, digitization has created many new opportunities to empirically analyze these questions by leveraging new data sources and abundant natural experiments in media markets. 

In this chapter we describe the open "big picture" questions related to digitization and the copyright industries, and discuss methodological approaches to leverage the new data and natural experiments in digital markets to address these questions. We close our chapter with a specific proof of concept research study that analyzes an important academic and managerial question -- the impact of legitimate streaming services on the demand for piracy. We use ABC's decision to add its content to Hulu.com as a natural experiment and show that it resulted in an economically and statistically significant drop in piracy of that content.
ER  -