On the other hand, some people who currently don’t get bundled cable at all would take the opportunity to buy a few channels. Since those new entrants would be better off, Mr. Crawford and Mr. Yurukoglu estimate that unbundling would slightly benefit consumers, raising the value of the typical cable service by 0.2 percent. But they note that’s before accounting for the fact that unbundled packages would cost more to market and deliver than bundled ones.

Another economist, Dmitri Byzalov of Temple University, takes an even more pessimistic view. He finds that unbundling would make consumers modestly worse off, in part because he does not think as many current nonsubscribers would sign up for a few channels as Mr. Crawford and Mr. Yurukoglu do.

Not everyone would lose out. For example, if you never watch sports, you might be better off not having to pay for ESPN, which charges the highest carriage fee of any basic cable channel. But Mr. Byzalov estimates that sports channel carriage fees would more than triple under unbundling, as most subscribers opt out and only die-hard sports fans buy in. Consumers who don’t care about sports at all would be better off, but casual sports fans would be worse off: They wouldn’t find it worth paying $37 for an unbundled cluster of sports channels, even if they would have paid the roughly $9 that it costs to get those channels as part of a bundled package.

All of this is counterintuitive. Packaging a product so you’re mostly buying stuff you don’t want seems as if it should be bad for consumers. And I’ve pointed out the advantages of unbundling in other areas of the economy.

I have praised Frontier Airlines’ new fee for carry-on baggage, calling it an unbundling of airfares that “allows travelers to pay for only what they use.” But not everything should be unbundled, particularly things like cable channels, which are not really things you “use.”

Think of it this way: If I put my bag in an overhead luggage bin, you can’t put your bag in the same spot, so it makes sense to charge me personally for my use. But if I watch Bravo, that doesn’t stop anyone else from watching the same show. When a good is “nonrivalrous” like a cable signal, giving it to me doesn’t stop anyone else from using it or add production costs at the margin. In those cases, it can make sense to throw lots of stuff into one package, whether or not I’ll actually use it.