The effect of social interactions in the primary life cycle of motion pictures

TL;DR

This paper models the social interaction effects on movie theater attendance over time, providing an analytical framework that aligns well with empirical data and offers a new way to measure a film's perceived quality based on viewer dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces an analytical model of movie consumption dynamics that incorporates social interactions and validates it with empirical industry data.

Findings

Model accurately fits diverse attendance behaviors

Quantifies cultural value from social interaction dynamics

Provides a critic-independent measure of film quality

Abstract

We model the consumption life cycle of theater attendance for single movies by taking into account the size of the targeted group and the effect of social interactions. We provide an analytical solution of such model, which we contrast with empirical data from the film industry obtaining good agreement with the diverse types of behaviors empirically found. The model grants a quantitative measure of the valorization of this cul- tural good based on the relative values of the coupling between agents who have watched the movie and those who have not. This represents a measurement of the observed quality of the good that is extracted solely from its dynamics, independently of critics reviews.