Pluralism and Concentration of Media Ownership: Measurement Issues

Diversification and ownership concentration

We consider a mean-variance general equilibrium economy where the expected returns for controlling and non-controlling shareholders are different because the former are able to divert a fraction of the profits. We find that when investor protection is poor, asset return correlation affects ownership structure in a positive way. Higher return correlation lowers the benefits of diversification wh...

Viewpoint Diversity and Media Ownership

Ownership : Trends , Determinants , Issues

Software patents and university-owned patents represent two of the more controversial intellectual property developments of the past 25 years. For the last few years, the European Union has been embroiled in a fierce debate over the merits of explicitly allowing software patents. In the U.S., where such patents clearly exist, various legal scholars have quarreled with the breadth of software pa...

Some Issues on Agent Ownership

Agent ownership is a complex issue that crosses legal domains. There are at least two different dimensions to agent ownership. On one dimension, an agent is a piece of software and as such it is an intellectual property which belongs to its owner and is governed by the law on intellectual property. On another dimension, a software agent can act like a business agent. In this paper we discuss so...

Ownership Concentration and Strategic Supply Reduction∗

We explore ownership concentration as a means to seek rents in the context of the U.S. government’s planned acquisition of broadcast TV licenses in the ongoing incentive auction. We document the significant purchases of licenses by private equity firms in the run-up to this auction and perform a prospective analysis of the effect of firms controlling multiple licenses on the outcome of the auct...