Foreword

For several years, I have accompanied the development of this work by Christian Zabel. I have seen it grow like an onion and often thought it was finally complete. However, Christian Zabel has a penchant for perfection and has added new layers around the core of economic program competition over the years, integrating newer theories, incorporating approaches from other sciences, and continuously expanding his empirical foundation. The core of the work is the analysis of competition in the television production sector. This is highly commendable because TV input production is of central economic, strategic, and journalistic importance, yet it is hardly acknowledged by the mainstream of media economics research. Christian Zabel chooses the analytical tools of industrial economics to address its particularities.