IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/apeclt/v19y2012i14p1411-1415.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Inflation in weekend box office estimates

Author

Listed:
  • Neil Malhotra
  • Edmund Helmer

Abstract

Do movie studios inflate box office estimates that they report every Sunday? Is the pattern of this inflation consistent with the studios’ strategic incentives? Analysing actual and estimated box office returns of major movie releases between 2003 and 2010, we find that movie studios substantially overestimate weekend box office performance and that this overestimation is highly unlikely to be due to chance. Our findings also suggest that box office inflation is strategic because (1) inflation is substantially higher in the first weekend of release when the incentives are greatest to generate positive word of mouth and (2) inflation for the top two films in a weekend increases with the degree of competition between the films.

Suggested Citation

  • Neil Malhotra & Edmund Helmer, 2012. "Inflation in weekend box office estimates," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 19(14), pages 1411-1415, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:apeclt:v:19:y:2012:i:14:p:1411-1415
    DOI: 10.1080/13504851.2011.631883
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13504851.2011.631883
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/13504851.2011.631883?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jordi McKenzie, 2023. "The economics of movies (revisited): A survey of recent literature," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 37(2), pages 480-525, April.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:apeclt:v:19:y:2012:i:14:p:1411-1415. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RAEL20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.