Germano, FabrizioMeier, MartinUniversitat Pompeu Fabra. Departament d'Economia i Empresa2020-05-252020-05-252010-12-01Journal of Public Economics, Vol. 97, pp. 117-130, 2013http://hdl.handle.net/10230/11728Within a simple model of non-localized, Hotelling-type competition among arbitrary numbers of media outlets we characterize quality and content of media under different ownership structures. Assuming advertising-sponsored, profit-maximizing outlets, we show that (i) topics sensitive to advertisers can be underreported (self-censored) by all outlets in the market, (ii) self-censorship increases with the concentration of ownership, (iii) adding outlets, while keeping the number of owners fixed, may even increase self-censorship; the latter result relies on consumers' most preferred outlets being potentially owned by the same media companies. We argue that externalities resulting from self-censorship could be empirically large.application/pdfengL'accés als continguts d'aquest document queda condicionat a l'acceptació de les condicions d'ús establertes per la següent llicència Creative Commonsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/workingPapermedia economics; media consolidation; media markets; advertising and commercial media bias.Microeconomicsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess