Didier Laussel

Press advertising and the ascent of the 'Pensée Unique'

The press industry depends in a crucial way on the possibility of financing an important fraction of its activities by advertising receipts. We show that this induces the editors of newspapers to moderate, in several cases, the political message they display to their readers, compared with the political opinions they would have expressed otherwise. To this end, we consider a three-stage game in which editors select sequentially their political image, the price of their newspaper and the advertising tariff they oppose to the advertisers. The intuition of the result lies in the fact that editors have to sell tasteless political messages to their readers in order to sell a larger audience to the advertisers.

Attitudes toward advertising and price competition in the press industry

We consider a situation of duopolistic competition in the press industry, involving two editors competing in both the newspapers and advertising markets. The population of readers in this market is differentiated in terms of their attitudes toward advertising; some of them are assumed to be advertising-lovers, while the remaining ones are assumed to be advertising-averse. We analyse a two-period sequential game whose players are the editors each selling a magazine of different political content. The editors also sell some proportion of their newspapers surface as advertising support for the products sold by the advertisers. In the first stage of the game, editors select the newsstand price of their magazine and, in the second stage, the advertising tarif they oppose to the advertisers. We identify the equilibrium of this sequential game and examine how it depends on the proportion of ad-lovers and ad-avoiders readers and on the intensity of their attraction-repulsion feelings for advertising.

Unidimensional Downsian politics: median, utilitarian or what else?

Abstract In this note, we show that in the probabilistic version of the standard unidimensional Downsian model with two candidates maximizing their expected pluralities there do not exist Nash equilibria in pure strategies whenever the probabilistic component is arbitrarily small but not degenerate. We argue that empirical research on electoral competition should pay more attention to the magnitude of partisanship in each group of voters, since equilibrium predictions will be very sensitive to that specific electoral parameter.

Advertising and Competitive Access Pricing to Internet Services or Pay-Tv

We study access pricing by platforms providing internet services ot pay-TV to users while they allow advertisers to have access to these users against payment via ads or banners. Users are assumed to be ad-haters. It is shown that equilibrium access prices in the usersmarket are increasing in the dimension of the advertising market: the larger the number of advertisers, the higher the access prices for both platforms.

Intersectoral adjustment and unemployment in a two-country Ricardian model

In a two-country Ricardian model, we study the dynamics of intersectoral reallocation of labour following upon a once and for ail move to free trade. The job creation/destruction process in both sectors is slow and this results in unemployment during the transition toward the long run free trade equilibrium. We identify different free trade regimes depending on whether or not the world relative price is between the two autarkic prices. In some regimes, one of the two countries overshoots its autarkic equilibrium i.e. temporarily specializes according to its comparative disadvantage. In that case, welfare increases in both countries. In other regimes, the adjustment process is monotonie in both countries but welfare increases in only one country. When the two countries have very different rates of job creation/destruction, the world price adjusts in such a way that the difference in adjustment speed between the two countries decreases.