Education

PhD expected May 2024, University of Virginia
MA, Economics, University of Virginia- 2019
MA, Economic Theory, ITAM- 2018
BA, Economics, Boston College- 2015

Short Abstract

Bargaining for Exclusive Rights in Two-Sided Markets: The Case of the NFL and Broadcast Channels
October 2023

The National Football League (NFL) represents its 32 member teams when bargaining with broadcasters over NFL broadcasting rights. Current broadcasting contracts restrict access to NFL Sunday games based upon a viewer’s location. I develop an endogenous disagreement payo↵s extension to the standard bargaining model to describe the interaction between the NFL and broadcasters when allocating broadcasting rights. The disagreement payo↵ is found by calculating profits under the counterfactual when the broadcaster does not win. This is done by estimating viewer and advertiser benefits in a full two-sided equilibrium model of advertiser-consumer interaction mediated by channel ad choices and then changing broadcast programs. I estimate advertiser willingness-to-pay to reach a viewer at $0.04. I conduct simulations for when NFL bargaining is decentralized to the division level. The estimates suggest that while the price of contracts increases, broadcaster profits increase due to the flexibility in bundling games.

JEL Classification: C78, L82, L83, M37
Keywords: two-sided markets, bargaining, advertising, media economics, broadcast television

∗University of Virginia; jmb3ue@virginia.edu; I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Bankard Fund for Political Economy and the Quantitative Collaborative at the University of Virginia. I thank Simon Anderson, Federico Ciliberto, Gaurab Aryal and Maxim Engers for their insightful comments. I also thank Suchitra Akmanchi, Dennis Campbell, W. Ben Chenault, Jessica Montgomery, Max Schnidman, Bertan Turhan, and participants of the IO Graduate Meetings at the University of Virginia for their helpful suggestions. Results derived using data from The Nielsen Company (US), LLC. The interpretations drawn from the Nielsen data solely represent the perspectives of the researchers and do not represent the views of Nielsen. Nielsen was not involved in the analysis or preparation of the results contained herein. All errors are my own.