Revealed word-of-mouth demand and adaptive supply: survival of motion pictures at the Australian box office

This study considers a frailty duration approach to modelling the life-length of a sample of 360 films that went into wide release at the Australian box office from 1 January 2000 to 31 December 2005. The analysis extends previous research by considering a range of film-specific covariates relating to distribution, production, consumer signals, and weekly performance. In particular, it is shown that film success (defined in a duration context) responds to previewing, advertising, critical reviews, and US box office—but not to production budget, star power or opening-week screens. The study also reveals that it is appropriate to account for unobservable heterogeneity between films in the choice of empirical methodology.     

Movie stars and box office revenues: an empirical analysis

This paper examines the relationship between star power and box office revenues using box office data from nine countries and a continuous measure of star power based on the number of visits to a star’s web page on IMDB, the most popular web site for movie-related information. The degree of star power is computed for the top star, top three stars, and the director for the films in our sample. The results indicate that replacing an average star with a top star would increase revenues by an average of 16,618,570, while replacing three average stars with three top stars would increase revenues by an average of16,618,570, while replacing three average stars with three top stars would increase revenues by an average of 64,410,381.     

The impact of film reviews on the box office performance of art house versus mainstream motion pictures

Critics and their reviews can play an important role in consumer decision making in general, and film choice in particular. In this study, we propose that consumers of art house movies are being led by film reviews when making a film choice (influence effect), whereas consumers of mainstream movies are hypothesized to rely mainly on other sources of information. Thus, in the latter case the review does not influence the moviegoer, but may still be a reflection of the ultimate success of the movie (predictor effect). Using the Dutch film industry as our empirical setting, we study the effects of reviews on the opening weekend and on the cumulative box office revenue. Our research shows that the number and size of film reviews in Dutch newspapers directly influence the behavior of the art-movie-going public in their film choice. The number and size of film reviews of mainstream movies, on the other hand, only predict movie performance.

Learning about movies: the impact of movie release types on the nationwide box office

Major Hollywood studios typically release new movies in North America in one of the two ways, wide release or platform release. In this paper, we investigate how release form affects the demand of a new movie after it is nationally released. In particular, we focus on movies for which the platform release is pre-planned to make the problem tractable. We estimate our model using a sample of Hollywood movies that eventually received nationwide release from 1999 to 2003. Our results show that platform release shifts consumers’ perception of unobservable movie appeal through its first stage performance, which turns out to be a stronger effect than that of advertising. Meanwhile, we find that the demand for platform movies decays faster than for wide release ones after their national release. Using counterfactual analysis, we find that more than half of the platform movies which later went to national release would have earned higher profits if they had been given a wide release.     

Welfare economics and public subsidies to the Arts

Reprinted from Manchester School of Economics and Social Studies, December 1969, pp. 323–35 with the permission of Basil Blackwell Ltd. Professor Sir Alan Peacock (born 1922) has a distinguished career as an academic economist and public servant, chairing, among other things, the Arts Council Enquiry on Orchestral Resources 1969–70, the Committee on Financing the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 1985–86; and the Scottish Arts Council 1986–92. He has written widely on cultural economics, includingThe Composer in the Marketplace (with Ronald Weir, 1975) and his autobiographicalPaying the Piper (1993) reviewed in thisJournal 18(1), 1994. He has been a member of the Editorial Board of theJournal of Cultural Economics since its inception. Reprinting this article is a tribute to his long and much valued involvement in our field.     

Introduction to Alan Peacock's “Welfare economics and public subsidies to the Arts”

Karl Eller Professor of Economics and Political Science, The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, U.S.A.     

Past,present and future: music economics at the crossroads

This paper contextualises research on the economics of music. The papers considered represent a crossroad in economics music research. One branch is the most heavily explored area of the impact of digital technology on consumption of music. The others comprise one entirely new topic which is crowd-sourced funding of new music recordings. The other topics are extremely old in terms of relevance but very new in terms of there being little prior economic analysis. These are environmental damages from musical activity and the efficiency of belonging to a pop–rock musical ensemble versus being a solo artist.     

Growth,accessibility and the distribution of arts activity in the United States: 1980 to 1990

Using data on the location of artists by state as a proxy for the location of artistic activity, this paper shows that from 1980 to 1990 the arts grew rapidly and became more dispersed, reversing a trend toward greater concentration during the 1970s. Accessibility increased as the ratio of artists to population rose in most states. Nevertheless, enormous inter-state variation in that ratio remains. The second part of the paper examines the determinants of artist location at the state level. The equations estimated for both years prove to have a high degree of explanatory power.This paper was presented at the 9th international conference of the Association for Cultural Economics, held in Boston, May 8–11, 1996.     

Humanities–Industry Partnerships and the ‘Knowledge Society’: The Australian Experience

National research policies are today driven by the concept of the ‘knowledge society’, in which development is deemed to follow the application of new ideas. Australia, like other countries, has encouraged partnerships between the universities and industry. This essay examines how Australian scholars in the humanities have responded to the Australian Research Council’s Linkage Projects. Their experience underlines the importance of viewing collaboration as social practice, and the need to find a satisfactory synthesis between academic and industry perspectives.     

An evaluation of daylight distribution as an initial preventive conservation measure at two Smithsonian Institution Museums, Washington DC, USA

This paper presents the results of a light levels survey conducted at the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture in Washington DC. The museum space is shared by the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. After six years of extensive renovations, the building reopened to the public in July 1, 2006. The structure was not originally designed to house a museum collection since it contains numerous openings such as windows, doors and skylights, which provide a path for natural radiation to enter the building and come in contact with the artworks. From a preventive conservation standpoint, this is an important problem since sensitive works of art in the collection may be subjected to damage caused by light exposure. Environmental data loggers installed throughout the museum were programmed to take successive measurements every 10 min for 24 h a day, 7 days a week and 52 weeks a year. This light levels assessment started in November 1, 2007 and finished in October 31, 2008. This study presents a new method for determining natural radiation exposures registered in exhibition spaces that rely on both electric lighting and natural lighting, considering the growing trend of using daylight illumination in museums.     

Cosmopolitical encounters: Prototyping at the National Zoo in Santiago,Chile

This article presents an empirical reflection on how the prototyping of an environmental enrichment device for chimpanzees at the National Zoo of Chile precipitates a cosmopolitical encounter. Using material produced by design students, zookeepers and the chimps Judy and Gombe, we describe how prototyping iterations establish open processes of dialogue and encounters among humans and nonhumans. The case will demonstrate how prototyping can go further than the generation of models of an original. On the contrary, the cosmopolitical encounter emerging from the prototyping process makes evident a truly ontological vocation, acknowledging humans and other-than-human beings as singular entities. Its provisional and malleable nature turns this device into a privileged locus for the exploration of interspecies entanglement. Although zoos are scientifically organized institutions, in this case we observe how its anthropocentric hierarchy was performatively reshuffled at certain moments of the prototyping process. The cosmopolitical qualities of the prototyping process analyzed derive from its capacity to deploy an ethics of attention and care between the agencies at play, that is, for unfold gestures of mutual vulnerability. Finally, we propose prototyping as a device for moving from cosmopolitics as a way of understanding the world to cosmopolitics as a matter of design.     

An Artistic Production Function: Theory and an Application to Australian Visual Artists

This paper proposes a production function for artistic output in which quantity and quality of output are specified as joint products from the inputs of labour and capital provided by individual artists. A model is constructed specifying the quantity of creative and commercial output and the quality of creative output as a function of inputs of labour time and of physical and human capital. Included in the latter is a variable to account for the contribution of creative talent to an artist's human capital. The model is estimated for a sample of practising professional visual artists and craftspeople in Australia. The results suggest that a model along the lines indicated may be taken as a plausible representation of the artistic production process.     

A Note on Financial Risk, Return and Asset Pricing in Australian Modern and Contemporary Art

In this note, 30,227 paintings by fifty well-known modern and contemporary Australian artists sold at auction over the period 1973–2003 are used to construct a hedonic price index. The attributes included in the hedonic regression model include the name, age and living status of the artist, the number of works sold, the size and medium of the painting, and the auction house, month and year in which the painting was sold. The results indicate that returns on Australian modern and contemporary art averaged nearly five percent over the period with a standard deviation of sixteen percent. The results also show that a ten percent increase in the Australian stock market is associated with a 3.4 percent increase in the art market. Generally, artworks by artists deceased at the time of auction, larger works, works executed in oils, and those auctioned by Sotheby's or Christies in July or August are associated with higher prices.