Handbook on the Economics of the Media

Media industries and services present a complex set of challenges to economic analysis: challenges made more difficult by the technological changes that have been transforming the media sector. Research on the economics of media has made major advances in recent years and has contributed greatly to an increasingly sophisticated understanding of how media are shaped by economic forces, including those unleashed by new technologies. This Handbook examines the variety of contexts and infrastructures in which content is produced and distributed and how these influence the types of media products and services available, their pricing, their consumption and the public policies related to them. The original contributions provide a state-of-the-art guide to the most recent thinking and research findings on the broad range of media-related topics addressed by economics research. Written by leading scholars, this book should be informative and of practical value for advanced students, policy makers, industry professionals, economists, media economists, and other academics.