Broadcasting quotas of domestic contents are commonplace in developed
countries. The main rationale for them is to promote diversity by fostering
domestic content and hence a more diverse production. This intuitive ignores
the trade-off between repetition and new program diffusion. When consumers
care only for the contents they really like, a broadcaster confronted to a
quota will find optimal to compensate for the reduction of foreign
programming by increasing the number of diffusions of substitutable domestic
programs. Total broadcasting time being limited, this will force the
broadcaster to abandon less popular types of programming, whereby reducing
program diversity. Keywords: radio, broadcasting, cultural quotas,
diversity JEL: L59, L82, Z10 Soumis
his paper models the book retail market as a dual market. Consumers
choose between competitively retailed, well-identified blockbusters, and
going to a monopoly bookshop to find the best match for their tastes. I
show that uncertainty about the status on a given title (will it be a
blockbuster or not?) places publishers in front of a trade-off between low
prices (valuable if they get a blockbuster) and high prices (in the other
case). The main effect of this trade-off is a decrease of wholesale prices
compared with the case of full information, thus enabling the bookshop to
compete with lower-priced blockbusters. Uncertainty thus increases both
industry profits and consumer surplus. A fixed book price further
increases consumer surplus and profits of non-blockbuster publishers, at
the expense of those who get a blockbuster.
Keywords: books, fixed book price
JEL: L11, L42, Z11
