ABSTRACT
Research flourishes in a pluralistic environment, and offering directions for the future risks being presumptuous. As this book demonstrates, media economics is indeed a wide-ranging area of research, and scholars pursue their interests as they see fit. Rather than proposing a next grand research design for media economics, this chapter will offer suggestions for incremental next steps that we think will advance the collective body of knowledge about how media firms and consumers behave and the design and effects of policy toward media. These suggestions aim to develop a better understanding of media economics and government regulation of media by adapting existing economic theories to media firms and by developing theories specifically for examining media firms and consumers.
