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Bestseller Lists and Product Variety: The Case of Book Sales
Abstract
This paper uses detailed weekly data on sales of hardcover fiction books to evaluate the impact of the New York Times bestseller list on sales and product variety. In order to circumvent the obvious problem of simultaneity of sales and bestseller status, the analysis exploits time lags and accidental omissions in the construction of the list. The empirical results indicate that appearing on the list leads to a modest increase in sales for the average book, and that the effect is more dramatic for bestsellers by debut authors. The paper discusses how the additional concentration of demand on top-selling books could lead to a reduction in the privately optimal number of books to publish. However, the data suggest the opposite is true: the market expansion effect of bestseller lists appears to dominate any business stealing from non-bestselling titles.
... Die Informationsbeschaffung über die Lesewürdigkeit des Buches -z. B. durch Kritiker oder Bestsellerlisten (Clement/Proppe/Sambeth, 2006: 2ff.;Sorensen, 2004: 2ff.) -kann jedoch deutlich durch das Marketing beeinflusst werden. ...
... ingegen Informationsquellen wie Verlagsverzeichnisse, das Verkaufsgespräch mit einem Vertreter sowie weitere direkte Kommunikationsmaßnahmen der Verlage eine große Rolle. Eine spezielle Werbeform stellt die Bestsellerwerbung dar, bei der das Buch gezielt über die Nennung von Autor und Bestsellerlistenrang positioniert wird (Lauterbach, 1979: 95ff.;Sorensen, 2004). Die zentrale Fragestellung für einen Verlag betrifft hier die optimale Allokation des Werbebudgets. Bei der Vielzahl der Bücher im Verlagsprogramm muss eine Auswahl stattfinden, so dass bestimmte Bücher gezielt beworben werden können. Darüber hinaus ist auch das gewählte Werbemedium relevant, da die empirischen Untersuchungen hier durc ...
... It also is important to consider the decision-making processes of "support media" such as magazine and newspaper book review sections and television and radio talk shows, which often will use best-seller lists in their decision making regarding which authors or books to feature (see Shandler, 2001), which again enhances the sales prospects for those books that already are performing well. Clearly then, best-seller lists operate, to a certain degree, as "self-fulfilling prophecies" (Truitt, 1998, p. 1), with the appearance of books on best-seller lists having a demonstrable impact on a book's sales (Ipsos Book Trends, 2002;Sorensen, 2004). ...
... In this regard, however, the book publishing industry is similar to other sectors of the media industry-particularly television-where certain content providers have seen the methodological shortcomings of established systems as advantageous to their interests, and have consequently sought to maintain them in the face of concerted efforts at methodological improvement (see Napoli, 2003a). However, perhaps more so than in other media industry sectors, the publishing industry's market information regime serves not only as a reflection of consumer demand but also as a driver of consumer demand (Sorensen, 2004). ...
This article presents a case study of the transition to a new market information regime, via an analysis of the transition to the BookScan system of measuring book sales and the potential impact of this new measurement system on how publishing industry decision makers perceive—and respond to—their competitive environment. This study critically examines the traditional systems of audience measurement—and their uses—in book publishing, as well as the diffusion process for the BookScan system. This study finds many similarities between the introduction and potential impact of BookScan and the introduction and impact of new audience measurement systems in other media, such as stronger resistance from content producers (e.g., publishers) than from other stakeholders (e.g., agents, retailers), as well as a likelihood that widespread usage of the new measurement system will contribute to greater fragmentation and greater volatility of the measured industry.
... After the artist delivers the album, the label decides whether to release it and 26 This may partly explain why book sales are much more skewed than music sales. (See Sorensen [19] for some evidence and discussion of the skewed distribution of sales for hardcover fiction.) 27 Sorensen [19] documents a similar phenomenon of success breeding success in the market for books: appearing on the New York Times' bestseller list has a direct positive impact on sales. ...
... (See Sorensen [19] for some evidence and discussion of the skewed distribution of sales for hardcover fiction.) 27 Sorensen [19] documents a similar phenomenon of success breeding success in the market for books: appearing on the New York Times' bestseller list has a direct positive impact on sales. Also, the effect is negligible for well-known authors, but quite large for debut authors—a result that parallels the finding here that backward spillovers are largest when a hit new album is released by a relatively unknown artist. ...
This paper studies the role of consumer learning in the demand for recorded music by examining the impact of an artist%u2019s new album on sales of past and future albums. Using detailed album sales data for a sample of 355 artists, we show that the release of a new album increases sales of old albums, and the increase is substantial and permanent%u2014especially if the new release is a hit. Various patterns in the data suggest the source of the spillover is information: a new release causes some uninformed consumers to learn about their preferences for the artist%u2019s past albums. These information spillovers suggest that the high concentration of success across artists may partly result from a lack of information, and they have significant implications for investment and the structure of contracts between artists and record labels.
... Sin embargo, existen otros tipos de lectura y otros planos de la realidad social que son necesarios para entenderlas. Así también, la interacción entre personas tiene efectos en la lectura, tal como ocurre con el crecimiento en las ventas de los best sellers (Sorensen 2004) que indirectamente se relaciona con una expansión de la lectura. De igual forma, se puede pensar en el rol que cumplen ciertas organizaciones, como ONG, ministerios y consejos estatales, en la difusión de ciertos títulos, formas y lugares de lectura, dando paso a un rol activo en la formación de prácticas lectoras desde una dimensión institucional. ...
... The greater the number of new e-petitions, the less likely that one of these limited number of slots will be available. This emphasis on initial popularity is seen in other markets that chart popularity, such as with books (Sorensen, 2004) and music albums (Asai, 2009). In the USA the impact of having many epetitions opened on the same day is however positive, which suggests less of a competition effect between e-petitions, with less viable USA epetitions not appearing on the platform by virtue of the 150 signature threshold. ...
Many legislators around the word are offering the use of web based e-petitioning platforms to allow their electorate to influence government policy and action. A popular e-petition can gain much coverage, both in traditional media and social media. The task then becomes how to understand what features may make an e-petition popular and hence, potentially influential. One area of investigation is the linguistic and topical content of the supporting e-petition text. This study takes an existing methodology previously applied to the American government's e-petition platform and replicates the study for the United Kingdom's equivalent platform. This allows an insight into not only the United Kingdom's e-petition process but also a comparison with a similar platform. We find that when assessing an e-petition's popularity, the control variables are significant in both countries, e-petitions in the United Kingdom are more popular if some named entities are used in the text, and that topics are commonly more influential in America.
... Further, in order to enhance the robustness of our model validation, we use two additional benchmark models that take into account some variables that might be relevant to sales on Amazon: (a) NYT m = 1 if a product is listed in the New York Times Best Seller list on day m and zero otherwise; (b) ThirdPartyPrice m that represents the lowest price from third-party sellers. As suggested by Sorensen (2004), the majority of book buyers use the New York Times Best Seller list as a signal of what is worth reading. In our data, 11 out of 72 products had appeared in the New York Times Best Seller list at least once between January 2015 ...
... The role of information in the sale of products is an important question for a variety of reasons (Goeree 2008;Hendrick and Sorensen 2009;Jin and Leslie 2003;Sorensen 2007). First, incomplete information represents a welfare loss to consumers who, were they fully informed, would prefer to watch a less popular movie more aligned to their taste than the more popular movie they were aware of. ...
... This cumulative advantage dynamic solidifies the gap between the haves and have-nots, thus inhibiting mobility. Scholars have observed similar dynamics for the consecration of baseball players (Allen and Parsons 2006), song popularity (Salganik et al. 2006), author success (Sorenson 2007), and social status on the Internet (Restivo and van de Rijt 2012). The sociological literature on cumulative advantage and inequality suggests that in a reward system in which reinforcement is strong, mobility will tend to be low. ...
Contemporary scholarship has conceptualized modern fame as an open system in which people continually move in and out of celebrity status. This model stands in stark contrast to the traditional notion in the sociology of stratification that depicts stable hierarchies sustained through classic forces such as social structure and cumulative advantage. We investigate the mobility of fame using a unique data source containing daily records of references to person names in a large corpus of English-language media sources. These data reveal that only at the bottom of the public attention hierarchy do names exhibit fast turnover; at upper tiers, stable coverage persists around a fixed level and rank for decades. Fame exhibits strong continuity even in entertainment, on television, and on blogs, where it has been thought to be most ephemeral. We conclude that once a person's name is decoupled from the initial event that lent it momentary attention, self-reinforcing processes, career structures, and commemorative practices perpetuate fame.
... The empirical evidence on the effect of bestseller information on demand is surprisingly limited. To the best of our knowledge, the only study has been conducted by Sorensen (2004) who examines the impact of sales of books after they appear in the New York Times list. He finds that, on average, sales increase by 13-14% by being on the bestseller list. ...
Abstract Some manufactures ,and retailers reveal which products are their bestselling items while others
... Other studies analyze the success factors of music, such as the influence of awards, genre, gender, radio airplay, and so forth on album sales (e.g., Hamlen, 1991;Moe & Fader, 2001). Although we find only limited empirical research in the book market, indications suggest that critics, star power, and genre influence a book's success (e.g., Sorensen, 2005). In summary, the indicators that influence the demand and diffusion process of hedonic goods in the media industry can be categorized into three groups: (1) environment-specific factors, (2) adopter-specific factors, and (3) product-specific factors (Figure 1). ...
The consumption of hedonic goods, such as movies or books, involves multisensory, fantasy, and emotive aspects. Hedonic products are often consumed because of symbolic motives. As experience products, hedonic goods involve a high consumption risk for consumers; furthermore, suppliers of hedonic goods face significant competition. Because of these characteristics, hedonic goods have unique diffusion patterns. To provide an overview of these patterns, this article summarizes the current state of research regarding the diffusion of hedonic goods, assesses existing proposed models, and provides guidelines regarding estimating diffusion models. Furthermore, this article explains the influences of special product characteristics on diffusion processes. Results show that flexible diffusion models outperform the well-known Bass model, although the optimal modeling approach differs according to the product. Whereas the diffusion of movies nicely fits Gamma models, the diffusion of music requires more flexible models, such as logistic hazard or mixed Weibull.
... To our knowledge, only minor theoretical and even less empirical research has attempted to identify success factors for books (Hjorth-Andersen, 2000). The few empirical studies address only isolated success factors, such as the stardom of the author, critics and reviews, image of the publisher, bestseller lists, and plot (Greco, 1997;Sorensen, 2004;Sorensen & Rasmussen, 2004;Suzanne, 2004). Research into the success factors pertaining to other hedonic products, such as those in the film (DeVany & Walls, 1999;Litman, 1983;Ravid, 1999;Sawhney & Eliashberg, 1996) and music (Bradlow & Fader, 2001;Moe & Fader, 2001) industries, focus on additional variables and therefore are helpful for identifying some relevant determinants of book success. ...
Because hedonic aspects of products are difficult to evaluate prior to consumption, consumers seek signals to reduce their uncertainty. Opinion leaders, such as critics, may serve as key informants to consumers. This study considers the different roles and incentives of literary critics and how they influence the success of books. Furthermore, it empirically investigates the impact of 4 book critics featured on Germany's most popular literary television show, Das Literarische Quartett, on reviewed books' success. The variety of control variables included in the mixed regression models provide results pertaining to not only the critics, but also the success factors of books in general. Book success does not depend primarily on the mere appearance of a book on a television show or a favorable review of it; rather, awareness and word-of-mouth effects seem crucial, and books are more likely to succeed if critics disagree about the quality and express extreme judgments, even if those judgments are negative.
... These mechanisms are typically imperfect, however, and evaluating their impact on what gets sold (and, by extension, what ultimately gets produced) is an important objective for empirical research. Recent papers that address this general topic include Jin and Leslie [20], which examines the effects of publicly posting restaurants' health inspection scores; Sorensen [26], which analyzes the impact of published bestseller lists on the market for books; and Jin, Kato, and List [19], which studies the informational role of professional certifiers in the market for sportscards. ...
This paper studies the role of product discovery in the demand for recorded music. We show that releasing a new album causes a substantial and permanent increase in sales of the artist's old albums-especially if the new release is a hit. Patterns in these "backward spillovers" suggest that they result from consumers discovering the artist upon hearing the new release. To explore the implications of consumers' incomplete information, we estimate a simple, learning-based model of market demand. Our results imply that the distribution of sales is substantially more skewed than it would be if consumers were more fully informed. (c) 2009 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved..
Since the early twentieth century, when Daniel Mornet conducted his path-breaking survey of private library catalogues in an attempt to determine what people read during the enlightenment, historians have debated how to identify the best-selling texts in the distant past. Besides library catalogues, scholars of eighteenth-century France have ransacked will inventories, publishers’ archives, print licence registers, book auction records, the titles available in cabinets de lecture, and even the extraordinarily rich records of books stamped in an amnesty for pirated editions in 1777–1781. This article suggests that none of these sources taken in isolation can give us sufficient insight to provide a reliable overview of the book trade and the market for books. Taken together and analysed digitally, however, they give important representative insights into the best-selling texts, genres and authors of the eighteenth century. The article compares and contrasts the findings of several large-scale digital projects to identify and explore the best-selling – or most frequently-encountered-texts across a number of genres including school-books, self-help manuals, popular medical texts, creative literature and religious works. In the process, it will help us to think more critically about what constituted a best-seller in the early modern period. By revealing some broad contours of eighteenth-century print culture, it will also challenge existing narratives of the enlightenment, secularisation, popular literacy and the book trade.
In addition to paid and owned communication, “earned” communications channels are essential for success in entertainment. We analyze the role of word of mouth and distinguish between three types of such consumer communication: traditional, social media, and other electronic word of mouth, which are more than substitutes for each other when it comes to influencing an entertainment product’s performance. While word of mouth triggers “informed cascades” of information, we show that uninformed information cascades can also be quite influential. We discuss high chart rankings and pre-release buzz as powerful signals, both of which drive the success of new entertainment products, though at different points in time. We further portray automated recommender systems that process information about consumers’ liking of certain products into an information source that is considered to be valuable by others. The cultural nature of entertainment assigns further importance to judgments by professional reviewers and industry peers, as reflected in reviews and awards, such as the Oscar.
Ranglisten faszinieren Menschen — jeder möchte gerne den Wettbewerb dokumentiert sehen oder sich einordnen können. Neben der reinen Unterhaltung haben Ranglisten aber auch erhebliche psychologische und ökonomische Wirkungen auf zahlreiche Marktakteure. Auf der Basis eines umfangreichen Datensatzes aus der Buchbranche (609 Bücher) und zahlreichen Kontrollvariablen konzentrieren wir uns auf zwei Fragen: Zum einen untersuchen wir den Effekt der Positionierung eines Buches in der Bestsellerliste auf den wöchentlichen Absatz. Zum anderen suchen wir nach möglichen Schwellenwerten (z.B. die Top 10) in der Bestsellerliste. Mittels Paneldatenanalysen zeigen wir, dass in der kurzen Frist ein hoch signifikanter Erfolgsbeitrag der Bestsellerliste (Top 50) insgesamt vorliegt, d.h. es liegen keine Schwellenwerteffekte vor. In der langen Frist finden wir hingegen ausschließlich signifikante Effekte von Schwellenwerten. Dort weisen die Positionen innerhalb der Top 10 bzw. Top 20 in der Vorperiode einen signifikant positiven Effekt auf, allerdings findet sich kein Effekt der Bestsellerliste, wenn Positionen unterhalb der Top 20 belegt werden.
In many differentiated good markets like music, books, and movies, the choice set of available products is overwhelmingly large and growing as new products flow into the market each month. Consumers are not aware or poorly informed about many of the available products. They learn about the products and their preferences for them from the purchasing decisions of other consumers and through costly search. We use a variant of the sequential search models of Banerjee [2], Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer, and Welch [5] and Smith and Sorensen [16] to study market demand in these kinds of markets. The option to search prior to purchase leads to different dynamics and outcomes than the standard herding models. The results explain both the unpredictability of sales conditional on quality and the inequality of sales across products. The model also yields testable predictions regarding the impact of product quality, search costs, and price on the likelihood of a high-quality product ending up with low sales (i.e., a "bad" herd). We validate the model using data from an experimental study by Salganik, Dodds, and Watts [13].
Product quality is often unobservable ex-ante and consumers rely on experts’ judgments, sometimes coming under the form of ratings or awards. Do awards affect consumers’ choices or they are conferred to the most popular products? To disentangle this issue, we use data of the most important Italian Literary Prize, the “Strega Prize”, undertaking two different estimation strategies to evaluate the impact on book sales of being awarded the Prize. First, we adopt a Regression Discontinuity Design using as dependent variable a measure of book sales and as forcing variable (proxying for intrinsic book quality) the jury votes received by each nominated book in the competition. We find a very strong impact of the Strega Prize on sales. Second, using weekly data on appearances in bestseller lists, we estimate a difference-in-differences model, comparing sales performance of treated and control books before the award is conferred with their respective performance afterwards. The results confirm a huge influence of the Prize on book sales and show that most of the impact occurs in the weeks following the announcement.
We develop a model of herds in which consumers observe only the aggregate purchase history, not the complete ordered history of search actions. We show that the purchasing information changes the conditions under which herds can occur for both low- and high-quality products. Inferior products are certain to be ignored; high quality products may be ignored, but complete learning may also occur. We obtain closed form solutions for the probabilities of these events and conduct comparative statics. We test the model's predictions using data from an online music market created by Salganik, Dodds, and Watts (2006).
This paper studies dynamic pricing by a monopolist selling to buyers who learn from each other’s purchases. The price posted in each period serves to extract rent from the current buyer, as well as to control the amount of information transmitted to future buyers. As information increases future rent extraction, the monopolist has an incentive to subsidize learning by charging a price that results in information revelation. Nonetheless in the long run, the monopolist generally induces herding by either selling to all buyers or exiting the market.
Wie kam es, dass plötzlich der „Da Vinci Code“ (dt. „Sakrileg“) in aller Munde war, dass man von Freunden angesprochen wurde,
ob man „Die Vermessung der Welt“ schon gelesen hatte und was man denn zu „Feuchtgebiete“ sagt? Warum will jetzt jeder „Harry
Potter“ haben, auch wenn es dazu in den Tageszeitungen kaum Besprechungen gab, warum diskutiert jeder über „Die Wohlgesinnten“,
wer ist eigentlich dieses Autorenpaar Iny Lorentz, warum fragt jeder nach Allgäu-Krimis, was ist dran an „The Secret“ und
den über 750.000 Käufern, und wieso in aller Welt wollen über drei Mio. Menschen „Ich bin dann mal weg“ kaufen? Bewirkt hat
das für diese und viele andere Bücher, was Drucker (1977) gutes Marketing nennt: „Marketing verfolgt das Ziel, das Verkaufen
überflüssig zu machen.“ Hinter dieser Aussage steht die Einsicht, dass Marketing dazu dient, unbefriedigte Bedürfnisse zu
entdecken und zufriedenstellende Lösungen zu entwickeln (Drucker, 2007).
This paper analyses the effect of literary prizes and nominations on the subsequent market success using a panel dataset of
Dutch-language titles from January 2003 to June 2005. The analysis indicates winning a prize generally has a positive effect
on the ensuing sales, whereas nominations do not generate additional sales. The precise effect differs depending on the particular
prize. Winning a “home” debut prize has a significant positive effect on sales, and, to a lesser extent, “established” literary
prizes have a significant positive effect on the sales of the winning title, but winning a debut prize in the Netherlands,
the neighbouring country, has no effect on sales in Belgium.
KeywordsBooks-Prizes-Sales
JEL ClassificationZ11
The main goal of this thesis is to incorporate part of the flourishing literature on network structures in a marketing context. Most of the results we have obtained and presented generate several implications. First of all we hope that the reader, after going through these chapters is convinced that often networks do play a role, that they can explain different market dynamics and that studying networks can be used to develop marketing strategies. Most of the theoretical implications derive from the following metaphor: a new product that diffuses into a society of consumers is like an epidemic that spreads into a population of susceptible individuals. Inspired by this metaphor, we believe that marketing can gain useful insights studying, adjusting and adopting epidemic models. This is what we explicitly do in chapters 2, 3 and 4. We build different network structures of consumers with their preferences and their attributes and we study how the diffusion dynamics of different products vary. Although we believe that the diffusion of a new product might look like the spread of an epidemic, we are also aware that these two processes are not completely the same. A substantial part of the work presented here consists of adapting the epidemic models to a marketing framework that can include product characteristics, personal preferences and social influence.
The usual explanations for superstar effects---when a firm’s revenue is positive and convex in quality, and a few firms earn a large share of market revenue---are imperfect substitution between sellers, low marginal cost of output, and marginal cost declining as quality increases. Herein, a competitive model is developed in which superstar effects occur simply because a few firms have quality significantly higher than others. No firm needs to sell more than a small percentage of market output, and cost can increase in output and in quality (the latter possibly at no more than a decreasing rate).
This paper presents a feasibility study of proactive business performance management based on monitoring data for the Japanese book market. By using two years of such data, we developed three types of forecasts. We tested them with simulations to show how prediction-based book distribution can improve the book business
The relationship between market structure and product variety is critical, since too few or too many products may be produced given a particular market structure. This paper measures empirically the relationship between structure and variety in the music recording industry. Entropy is used to generate a measure of product variety. The results suggest that the relationship is non-monotonic: high and low levels of concentration result in lessened variety, and maximum variety is promoted by a moderately concentrated structure.
An inherent problem in measuring the influence of expert reviews on the demand for experience goods is that a correlation between good reviews and high demand may be spurious, induced by an underlying correlation with unobservable quality signals. Using the timing of the reviews by two popular movie critics, Siskel and Ebert, relative to opening weekend box office revenue, we apply a difference-in-differences approach to circumvent the problem of spurious correlation. After purging the spurious correlation, the measured influence effect is smaller though still detectable. Positive reviews have a particularly large influence on the demand for dramas and narrowly-released movies. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005.
Publishers produce books in hardcover and paperback versions with different prices and time of market introduction. Analysis of detailed book-level data reveals that (i) price-cost differentials cannot be explained by cost differences, making this an example of quality discrimination; (ii) market introduction time strongly affects sales, suggesting that time is the crucial dimension of discrimination; and (iii) there is substantial price rigidity across books and over time: prices depend on cost shifters but not on demand shifters. I discuss an explanation for this last finding in terms of the nature of demand in this market.
The author analyzes a sequential decision model in which each decisionmaker looks at the decisions made by previous decisionmakers in taking her own decision. This is rational for her because these other decisionmakers may have some information that is important for her. The author then shows that the decision rules that are chosen by optimizing individuals will be characterized by herd behavior; i.e., people will be doing what others are doing rather than using their information. The author then shows that the resulting equilibrium is inefficient. Copyright 1992, the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A dynamic incomplete information game is set up to study the introduction of a durable good when consumers can learn its quality from previous buyers. High sales today imply fewer potential buyers tomorrow, but each buyer will have better information about the good. Consumers are fully rational and can update their beliefs, even when they do not directly receive information; in equilibrium, no news is bad news. A low-quality firm follows a 'fly-by-night' strategy, randomizing over the timing of sales. A high-quality firm spreads out its sales more smoothly, solving a stochastic dynamic programming problem. Copyright 1997 by Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association.
Publishers produce books in hardcover and paperback versions with different prices and time of market introduction. Analysis of detailed book-level data reveals that (i) market introduction time has a strong effect on sales, suggesting that time is the crucial dimension of discrimination; (ii) differences in markups cannot be explained by cost differences, hence this is an example of price discrimination; and (iii) there is substantial price rigidity across books and over time: prices depend on cost shifters but not on demand shifters. I propose an explanation for this last finding in terms of the nature of the demand curve.
Did living standards stagnate before the Industrial Revolution? Traditional real-wage indices typically show broadly constant living standards before 1800. In this paper, we show that living standards rose substantially, but surreptitiously because of the growing availability of new goods. Colonial luxuries such as tea, coffee, and sugar transformed European diets after the discovery of America and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope. These goods became household items in many countries by the end of the 18th century. We use the Greenwood-Kopecky (2009) method to calculate welfare gains based on data about price changes and the rate of adoption of new colonial goods. Our results suggest that by 1850, the average Englishman would have been willing to forego 15% or more of his income in order to maintain access to sugar and tea alone. These findings are robust to a wide range of alternative assumptions, data series, and valuation methods.
Mergers can reduce costs and alter incentives about how to position products, so that theory alone cannot predict whether mergers will increase product variety. We document the effect of mergers on variety by exploiting the natural experiment provided by the1996 Telecommunications Act. We find that consolidation reduced station entry and increased the number of formats available relative to the number of stations. We find some evidence that increased concentration increases variety absolutely. Based on the programming overlap of jointly owned stations, we can infer that the effects operate through product crowding that is consistent with spatial preemption. . * We thank Yun-Sug Baik and Yu Li for assistance in assembling the dataset used in the study. Seminar participants at the 1998 American Economic Assocation meetings in Chicago, the Carnegie Mellon University/ University of Pittsburgh joint applied economics seminar, and the Wharton Applied Economics Seminar at the University of P...
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