The odds of success in creative industries like the book, music or movie industry are often said to be particularly low. A 1763 rule by Denis Diderot, for example, says that only one out of ten published books is a commercial success. Yet, representative evidence on new-product success rates and their development over time is scarce. Furthermore, the standard approach to use sales as success measure can be misleading from the producer's perspective. This paper presents a novel approach to empirically identify producer success by incorporating the standard terms of contract between creator and producer into a parsimonious model of information diffusion (word-of-mouth). The model is applied to a random sample of novels. Parametric and semiparametric estimates imply a success rate between 10 and 15\% for this market. Set against Diderot's rule, these results suggest that new-product success in the book industry has been fairly constant over time.
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Paper provided by University Library of Munich, Germany in its series MPRA Paper with number
17404.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Bronwyn H. Hall & Beethika Khan, 2003.
"Adoption of New Technology,"
NBER Working Papers
9730, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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