This paper develops a structural model of newspaper markets to analyze the effects of ownership consolidation, taking into account not only firms' price adjustments but also the adjustments in newspaper characteristics. A new dataset on newspaper prices and characteristics is used to estimate the model. The paper then simulates the effect of a merger in the Minneapolis newspaper market and studies how welfare effects of mergers vary with market characteristics. It finds that ignoring adjustments of product characteristics causes substantial differences in estimated effects of mergers.

This paper presents a method for estimating discrete games based on bounds of conditional choice probabilities. The bounds are probabilities that an action is dominant and that it is not dominated. Because the bounds are easy to compute, our method is scalable to models with many firms and discrete decisions. We apply the method to study the effects of a hypothetical merger on firm entry and product variety in local retail craft beer markets in California. We find that the merger induces firm entry. The net effect on product variety is ambiguous once a fixed cost efficiency is taken into account.