The TV news scheduling game when the newcaster's face matters

The present note first provides an alternative formulation of the Cancian, Bills and Bergström (1995)- problem which discards the non-existence difficulty and consequently allows to consider some extensions of the TV-newscast scheduling game. The extension we consider 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 we identify a sufficient condition on the dispersion of these preferences over the viewers'population guaranteeing the existence of a unique Nash equilibrium. It turns out that, at this equilibrium, both networks broadcast their news at the same instant.