Hotelling Location Problems with Directional Constraints: An Application to Television News Scheduling

Maria Cancian, University of Wisconsin
Angela Bills, University of Michigan
Ted Bergstrom, University of California, Santa Barbara

Abstract

If viewers prefer to watch the news as soon as they get home from work, how should competing television stations schedule their broadcasts to maximize their own numbers of viewers. This is a Hotelling location problem with a directional constraint. Viewers can watch after they get home, but not before. We show that for this model, there exists no pure strategy Nash equilibrium.