The TV News Scheduling Game: When the Face of the Newscaster Matters

This article first provides an alternative formulation of the Cancian, Bills and Bergstrom (1995) problem, which discards the non-existence difficulty and consequently allows one to consider some extensions of the TV newscast scheduling game. The extension considered consists in assuming that viewers' preferences between the competing channels do not depend only on the timing of their broadcast, but also on some other characteristics, like the content of the show or the identity of the newscaster. Then, this article identifies a sufficient condition on the dispersion of these preferences over the viewers' population, guaranteeing the existence of a unique Nash equilibrium.