Grazing or Staying Tuned: A Stochastic Dynamic Model of Channel Changing Behavior

Television programs seek to attract and hold audiences in order to show them advertisements. Audience members insist on controlling their media experience by changing the channel. As a result, there is great interest in understanding the factors that lead up to and contribute to the decision to change the channel. Many factors—related to audience individual differences, program content, and media structure—play a role in determining when the television viewer opts out of one program and into another, making it difficult to understand this dynamic behavior. A rigorous mathematical model can help to explain some aspects of this complex phenomenon. Based on the theoretical understanding of channel changing behavior in the current literature, the authors mathematically formalized a stochastic semi Markov choice model of channel changing behavior and submit it to