Handbook of Media Economics, vol 1A

for example, people may choose to have stations that are relatively different in order to

cater to different moods at different times of the day (e.g., a favorite News station, a Sports

station, a Lite Adult Contemporary station, and a Top 40 station), while tending not to

pre-program multiple stations that are very similar in nature. In this case, one might

expect that the desire to avoid multi-homing might lead to at least some pairs of com-

peting stations becoming very similar. Unfortunately, this is a conjecture and very little is

known about the empirical relationship between programming variety and multi-

homing, even though the theory clearly indicates that it is important.

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On the question of whether multi-homing could lead to a common