The effects of website provision on the demand for German women's magazines

What happens to demand if a magazine launches a website? This question is empirically analyzed for the German women?s magazine market, a particularly large segment of the German magazine where fierce competition is reigning. Models for differentiated product demand are estimated on panel data covering the period 1990 to 2000, showing that website provision does not significantly affect magazines? market shares. Magazines that launched a website face a significantly lower price elasticity of demand than competitors that did not go online. Descriptive evidence on the magazines? website contents shows that websites are used to provide supplementary information and to advertise current print issues. --differentiated product demand models,magazines,instrumentalvariables estimation,panel data

Do Media Consumers Really Dislike Advertising? An Empirical Assessment of a Popular Assumption in Economic Theory

This paper uses data on the population of German magazines for the period 1973 to 2004 to show that, contrary to conventional wisdom, there is little evidence for magazine readers disliking advertising. Many magazines in fact have readers who appreciate advertising. The degree of appreciation increases in reader age and decreases with income as well as with education.two-sided markets; advertising; Mean Group Estimation; media markets; nuisance

Strategic complementarities between different types of ICT-expenditures

Multivariate Tobit models are estimated using German cross?sectional data to test whether strategic complementarities exist between expenditures in four different types of ICT?components. If two ICT?components are complements, they are correlated (provided that agents act rationally). Significant correlations between all four types of ICT?expenditures are found and can neither be removed by ?standard? firm heterogeneity control variables such as firm size, firms? workforce qualification structure nor by firms? ICT?structure so that indication for the presence of complementarities is provided. --strategic complementarity,ICT-investment,multivariate Tobit model

The impact of political announcements on expectations concerning the starting date of the EMU - A microeconometric approach to the detection of event-dependent answering patterns in business surveys

This paper examines German business survey data to uncover the influence of political news on expectations concerning the starting date of the European Monetary Union (EMU). In this survey the participants were asked to indicate whether they expect a punctual or a delayed start of the EMU. Alternatively, they could also tick a don't know category. It is shown that political news actually influence answering patterns. While good news have a negative impact on the probability to cross don't know, they do not influence the probability to expect a delayed EMU start. Bad news, such as the heated debate about the convergence criteria at the Amsterdam EU summit, have a positive impact on the probability to expect a delayed start. The empirical results show that survey results generally have to be carefully interpreted if news about the topic which is investigated in the survey occur. If answering patterns are actually influenced by such news, the usual way to interprete survey responses - treating them as if they were sent back at the very same day - can lead to severe misunderstandings. In this paper a simple microeconometric technique is suggested which makes it possible to detect if survey responses are affected by news. --Binomial probit model,Expectations,European Monetary Union,Event-dependent answering patterns,Survey data

Optimal Cover Prices and the Effects of Website Provision on Advertising and Magazine Demand

I derive and estimate a model for cover price setting in print media markets where actors are faced by two interrelated demand curves: the demand for the print medium and the demand for advertising space. Publicly available data on German women?s magazines observed between 1998 and 2001 are used in the GMM estimation. Main findings are that my estimated marginals cost coincide well with those of industry sources, magazines with a high circulation elasticity of advertising demand price markedly below marginal cost and website provision neither has a significant effect on magazine nor on advertising demand. Keywords: magazines, cost estimation, GMM estimation, website provision --magazines,cost estimation,GMM estimation,website provision

How do drug prices respond to a change from external to internal reference pricing? Evidence from a Danish regulatory reform

Studies the effects of a switch from external reference pricing to internal reference pricing that was implemented in Denmark in April 2005. Abstract We study the effects of a change in the way patient reimbursements are calculated on the prices of pharmaceuticals using quasi-experimental data for Denmark which switched from external (where reimbursements are based on prices of similar products in foreign countries) to internal reference pricing (where they are based on the cheapest domestic substitute). We analyze three therapeutic classes with different treatment durations and show that the reform led to substantial price decreases for our lifelong treatment and to less substantial price reductions for our medium duration treatment while we do not find significant effects on our acute treatment. Moreover, the reform did only affect generics and did not impact original products or parallel imports

Productivity effects of organizational change: microeconometric evidence

This paper analyzes the relationship between investment in information and communication technologies (ICT), non-ICT-investment, labor productivity and workplace reorganization. Firms are assumed to reorganize workplaces if the productivity gains arising from workplace reorganization exceed the associated reorganization costs. Two different types of organizational change are considered : introduction of group-work and flattening of hierarchies. Empirical evidence is provided for a sample of 411 firms from the German business-related services sector. We develop and estimate a model for labor productivity and firms' decision to re-organize workplaces that allows workplace reorganization to affect any parameter of the labor productivity equation. Our general and flexible methodology allows to properly take account of strategic complementarities between the input factors and workplace reorganization. The estimation results show that changes in human resources practices do not significantly affect firms' output elasticities with respect to information and communication technologies (ICT), non-ICT-capital and labor although most of the point estimates of the individual output elasticities and of the control variables for observable firm heterogeneity are larger if workplace reorganization is realized. We therefore apply Kernel density estimation technique and demonstrate that for firms with organizational change the entire labor productivity distribution shifts significantly out to the right if workplace reorganization takes place, indicating that workplace reorganization induces an increase in labor productivity that is attributable to complementarities between the various input factors and workplace reorganization. By contrast, firms without organizational change would not have realized significant productivity gains if they had reorganized workplaces. --workplace reorganization,ICT-investment,labor productivity,endogenous switching regression model,Kernel density estimation

Price Structure in Two-sided Markets: Evidence from the Magazine Industry?

We present and estimate a model of competition in a two-sided market: the market for magazine readership and advertising. Using data on magazines in Germany, we find evidence that magazines have properties of two-sided markets. The results are consistent with the perception that prices for readers are "subsidized" and magazines make most of their money from advertisers. Consistent with advertisers valuing readers more than readers value advertisements, our results imply that higher demand or lower costs on the reader side increase ad rates, but that higher demand or lower costs on the advertising side decrease cover prices. --

Product innovation and product innovation marketing: theory and microeconometric evidence

This paper derives a three stage Cournot?oligopoly game for product innovation, expenditure on introducing the product and competition on the product market. Product innovation is assumed to increase consumer utility but is effective only if the innovating firm invests in marketing, so that consumers become aware of the newly developed product. Firms first decide whether or not to conduct product innovation and then determine their expenditure for bringing the new product to the market. In the final stage of the game, they are involved in competition on the product market. Key findings of the theoretical model are that both the marketing of a product innovation and a firm?s propensity to introduce an innovation decrease with an increase in the number of competitors and the degree of product substitutability. An increase in market demand has a positive effect on product innovation and marketing effort. These findings are tested empirically using survey data from 519 German service sector firms which mainly produce consumer goods. A simultaneous sequential Tobit model is applied in the empirical part of this paper. It turns out that the predictions of the theoretical model are supported by the empirical findings. --econometric models,game theory,new product research

A simple game-theoretical framework for studying R&D expenditures and R&D cooperation

This paper derives a three stage Cournot duopoly game for research collaboration, research expenditures and product market competition. The amount of knowledge firms can absorb is made dependent on their own research efforts, e.g. firms? absorptive capacity is treated as an endogenous variable. It is shown that cooperating firms invest more in R&D than non?cooperating firms if spillovers are sufficiently large. The degree of market competition is a key determinant of the effects of research cooperation on research efforts, implying that existing models which assume perfect competition might be too restrictive. --research cooperation,research expenditures,knowledge spillovers