Life beyond Individual Choice: Group Behaviour in Television Audiences

There is a rich marketing literature which uses television audience datasets to model, optimize or predict choice behaviours of television viewers and optimize firm decisions (e.g. Rust, Kamakura and Alpert, 1992; Shachar & Emerson, 2000; Moshkin & Shachar 2002; Bahrat and Shahar, 2004.) Some of these models have generated useful theoretical generalizations to enrich marketing scholarship. Almost all of these models, however, are individual choice –with at least one recent exception (Yang, Naraya, and Assael, 2006.) This tendency in the literature is quite understandable from multiple perspectives: a) researchers follow the parsimony rule; b) the models developed so far have acceptable explanatory power; and, c) group viewing behaviour is difficult to measure since data is usually not reported for each TV set.