The economic literature on the prospects for cable television in the nation's major television markets is universally pessimistic. The conventional wisdom, as expressed by Park and Mitchell in the pages of this Journal, is that cable systems will not be able to enroll many subscribers in areas...

In this paper, a television program cost function is derived from a simple model of network rivalry based upon the Cournot postulate. This cost function is then fitted to data from a cross section of new network entertainment series for 1960-1965. The resulting estimates are quite unfavorable to...

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