Controversy over corporate media consolidation has been brewing for decades. In 1975, the Federal Communications Commission enacted a rule prohibiting a single media company from owning both a newspaper and radio or TV station in the same city. Twenty-eight years later, the issue drew national attention when former FCC Chairman Michael Powell introduced a plan to overturn the ban. His . . .
The current conventional wisdom is that the rise of Internet video may mean the end of television as we know it — a view that extends to the music industry as well, as we’ve seen before. Viacom’s $1 billion copyright infringement suit against the Google-owned YouTube continues to lumber on, and the TV writers’ strike has led to speculation that . . .
Can a charitable act truly be called charitable when the contributor wants or expects a reward? In a new study, Princeton economics professor Harvey Rosen and Stanford graduate student Jonathan Meer examined this question using a specific case of incentivized charity: alumni donations. They found that the size and frequency of an alumnus’s contributions to his alma mater rise in . . .
In their Jan. 7, 2007, column for the New York Times Magazine, Dubner and Levitt ask the question we’ve all been asking: What do a gym membership, a bottle of prescription pills, and a holiday gift card have in common? This blog post supplies additional research material.