The economics and political economy of broadcasting: challenges in developing an analytic foundation

It seems premature to conclude that Noam has offered an analytic framework that will ultimately enable useful prediction concerning the array of issues he addresses. It appears that the employment of utility theory to aid in the selection of promising assumptions Just as utility theory provides the downward-sloping demand curves that are often usefully assumed. will be an important element of any successful further development of the framework. The apparent importance and difficulty of selecting a distribution for tastes suggests limited optimism. Moreover, it seems that the reliance on graphical methods is too restrictive a constraint to be accepted in future developments of the approach. Despite the apparent difficulty of using Noam's suggested framework, especially with the additional complexities recommended here, it or something like it may be the most promising alternative. (Has another been suggested?) The complexity of the issues involved suggests that no simpler framework is likely to suffice. Even if the suggested analytic framework proves to be unpromising, the paper makes a substantial contribution in raising an impressive variety of issues in the economics and political economy of broadcasting and providing language helpful in analyzing them. In his introduction Noam reports that it is "somewhat surprising to note how little interest academic economists have taken in the study of the medium, and particularly in the more theoretical aspects of program diversity." Perhaps the lack of theoretical literature in this area can be traced directly to the difficulty of developing plausible models that can be analyzed rigorously. Copyright Martinus Nijhoff Publishers 1987