The Performance of German Motion Pictures, Profits and Subsidies: Some Empirical Evidence

This paper pursues three objectives. First, it seeks to identify the determinants of performance of German motion pictures in terms of cinema admissions and producers’ rates of return. Second, against the background of heavy subsidization of the German film industry, it discusses two types of subsidy allocation: committee principle allocation and reference principle allocation. Third, the profitability of the industry is considered as the presumed economic non-viability of the industry constantly recurs in the public debate as an argument for subsidies. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. 2005German movies, motion picture, industry, subsidies,

Modeling Movie Success When ‘Nobody Knows Anything’: Conditional Stable-Distribution Analysis Of Film Returns

In this paper we apply a recently-developed statistical model that explicitly accounts for the extreme uncertainty surrounding film returns. The conditional distribution of box-office returns is analyzed using the stable distribution regression model. The regression coefficients in this model represent what is known about the correlates of film success while at the same time permitting the variance of film success at the box office to be infinite. The empirical analysis shows that the conditional distribution of film returns has infinite variance, and this invalidates statistical inferences from the often-applied least-squares regression model. The estimates of the stable regression confirm some earlier results on the statistics of the movie business and the analysis demonstrates how to model box-office success in the movie business where “nobody knows anything”. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. 2005motion picture success, Pareto-Lévy stable distribution, nobody knows principle,

Why some awards are more effective signals of quality than others: a study of movie awards

In this article, the authors develop and empirically test a conceptual framework that predicts which types of awards have the biggest impact on the competitive performance of the award winners. The empirical setting is an industry where awards proliferate, namely, the U.S. motion picture industry. Overall, their results suggest that awards granted by a jury composed primarily of end consumers, peers, or experts each have a different effect on consumer behavior, which can be explained in terms of differences in source credibility and award salience