Movie Ticket Research Articles

A blueprint for success in the US film industry

This article analyses motion picture box-office gross revenue using a cross-section of films from 1997 to 2001. The dependent variable is total domestic box-office revenue. The independent variables investigated include: production budget; peak number of screens that the film was shown on in theaters; Consumer price index for movie tickets; personal income; season and year of the release in theaters; a measure of pre-existing audience; aggregate critic rating; MPAA rating; genre; word-of-mouth recommendation; the presence of popular stars and the award nominations. A distinction is made in the analysis between information available to the public prior to the release of the film in theaters (ex ante) and information available to the public after the film opens in theaters (ex post). Results for the ex ante ordinary least squares (OLS) regression reveal positive impacts of budget, summer and holiday release dates, critical reviews, sequels and several genres on gross revenue. Significant, positive determinants in the ex post OLS regressions include budget, the peak number of screens, sequels, critical reviews, summer and holiday releases, word-of-mouth, award nominations and star power.

Convenient Prices, Currency, and Nominal Rigidity: Theory with Evidence from Newspaper Prices

Newspapers, movie tickets, and concession stand items typically charge prices that facilitate rapid, simple transactions: their prices often coincide with available monetary units, require few pieces of money, or require little change. In this sense, these prices are more convenient than other proximate prices. I model a firm that explicitly incorporates convenience into its pricing decisions, where convenience is quantified by the number of currency units in a transaction. The model illustrates how alternating periods of price rigidity and flexibility can arise in such a setting, along with rapid switching between convenient prices. I compile time series data on newspaper cover prices and use simulations to show that convenience is an essential component of these prices. In the empirical data, firms set prices that were more convenient than adjacent prices 61% of the time. Standard menu costs cannot replicate this behavior. Because convenience appears to affect many of the consumer goods and services with the stickiest prices in the U.S. economy, studies focusing on very sticky prices must be cognizant of convenience's role in effecting above-average price rigidity.

Consumer Information Sharing: Where the Sun Still Don't Shine

In late 2007, the popular social networking site Facebook.com adopted Beacon, an application that informs Facebook users' friends about purchases made and activities on other websites. For example, if a Facebook user bought a movie ticket on Fandango.com, that user's friends would be informed of that fact through a news feed on Facebook. Some users objected vigorously to the Beacon application, because their activities were reported on an opt-out basis, meaning that the user had to take affirmative action to prevent others from learning about their activities. An activism website, Moveon.org, organized a protest, calling users to action by asking, When you buy a book or movie online - do you want that information automatically shared with the world on Facebook? Facebook responded to these critiques by changing its to obtain express approval before activities on other sites would be shared with friends. The Facebook folly demonstrates how intensely consumers reject the of personal information for marketing purposes. In this instance, consumers learned of Facebook's strategy because it was transparent and obvious to the individual. But what most do not realize is that, in the absence of a specific law prohibiting information sharing, businesses are generally free to monetize their customer databases by selling, renting, or trading them to others. In fact, the sale of customer information is a common, albeit opaque practice that, if disclosed at all, is usually mentioned in a policy. Facebook's Beacon simply made information sharing obvious to users. Studies have shown that most consumers oppose the sale of personal information. Unfortunately, most consumers are under the misimpression that a company with a policy is barred from selling data. To learn more about information selling, the authors, using a California privacy law, made requests to 86 companies for a disclosure of information sharing practices. The results show that while many companies have voluntarily adopted a of not sharing personal information with third parties, many still operate under an opt-out model that is inconsistent with consumer expectations, and others simply did not respond to the request. Based on these results, the authors propose several public approaches to bringing business practices in information sharing in line with consumer expectations.

Hitting the Jackpot or Hitting the Skids: Entertainment, Poverty, and the Demand for State Lotteries

Abstract. State‐sponsored lotteries are a lucrative source of revenue. Despite their low payout rates, lotteries are extremely popular, particularly among low‐income citizens. State officials laud the benefits of lottery proceeds and promote the fun and excitement of participation. This entertainment value is one explanation for lottery demand by the poor: individuals with lower incomes substitute lottery play for other entertainment. Alternatively, low‐income consumers may view lotteries as a convenient and otherwise rare opportunity for radically improving their standard of living. Bad times may cause desperation, and the desperate may turn to lotteries in an effort to escape hardship. This study tests these competing explanations. We examine lottery sales data from 39 states over 10 years and find a strong and positive relationship between sales and poverty rates. In contrast, we find no relationship between movie ticket sales, another inexpensive form of entertainment, and poverty rates.

Defective rights management

Someone should produce a reality show based in corporate conference rooms. Oh sure, at first this sounds about as exciting as a reality show about actuaries. But who wouldn't want to see how, for example, bankrupt Northwest Airlines decided to distribute a memo to laid-off employees suggesting that they take dates on nice walks instead of buying movie tickets, and not to be "shy" about "pulling something you like out of the trash." Didn't people wearing suits have to gather around a meeting table and agree that this was a good idea? Who wouldn't want to see that? Oh, to be a fly on the wall at a major record label or movie studio meeting as they discuss the merits of DRM, or digital rights management. Wait, did I say "merits"?

The Evolving Food Chain: Competitive Effects of Wal-Mart's Entry into the Supermarket Industry

We analyze the effect of Wal-Mart's entry into the grocery market using a unique stor-level price panel data set. We use OLS and two IV specifications to estimate the effect of Wal-Mart's entry on competitors' prices of 24 grocery items across several categories. Wal-Mart's price advantage over competitors for these products averages approximately 10%. On average, competitors' response to Wal-Mart's entry is a price reduction of 1-1.2%, mostly due to smaller-scale competitors: the response of the big three supermarket chains (Alberson's, Safeway, and Kroger) is less than half that size. We confirm our results using a falsification exercises, in which we test for Wal-Mart's effect on prices of services that it does not provide, such as movie tickets and dry cleaning services.

Feasibility of Using Accelerometers to Measure Physical Activity in Young Adolescents

Accelerometers may provide valid measures of physical activity, but the feasibility of using accelerometers with large groups of children is unknown. We assessed feasibility in the Eating and Activity Survey Trial (Project EAST), a study designed to develop valid tools to assess eating and physical activity patterns among middle school children. Two hundred eighty-two Project EAST participants in grades 6-8 wore an accelerometer (Manufacturing Technologies, Inc., Fort Walton Beach, FL) for seven consecutive days. Multiple strategies were employed to encourage compliance and return of the accelerometer: 1) staff demonstrated how to wear the device properly; 2) students were given written and verbal instructions; 3) staff visited the students twice during 7 d to remind them to wear the devices and return them on time; and 4) movie tickets were given to students who returned the accelerometers on time. Data from 27 accelerometers were lost as a result of mechanical and nontechnical problems, resulting in unusable data for 8.5% of students. Days of data for the remaining 255 students were considered incomplete if the accelerometer registered less than three consecutive waking hours of zero counts. The percentage of students with complete accelerometer data for 3-7 d of data were > or = 3 d, 92%; > or = 4 d, 86%; > or = 5 d, 75%; > or = 6 d, 67%; and 7 d, 50%. Twenty-eight students (10%) returned their accelerometers late. Overweight children were significantly more likely to have 7 d of complete data than nonoverweight children. Our findings suggest that accelerometers are acceptable to most students. However, researchers working with middle school students should carefully monitor compliance to ensure that devices are worn properly and regularly.

Best Practices in Online Polling

Best Practices in Online Polling

The Titanic, Volkswagens and collaborative group work: Remaking old favourites with new learning technologies

<p>Unsinkable ships, Volkswagens and collaborative group work have much in common. They have each undergone a recent revival of sorts; in each case the new version bears a strong Wittgensteinian resemblance to its more classic predecessor; and in each case the end user is able to enjoy the nostalgic experience of having once again rediscovered the wheel. This is a powerful experiential principle, one so powerful in fact that it drives us to part with the cost of a movie ticket even though we know how the movie ends! The ship still sinks on April 14th; the 'bug' still looks like a beetle-plus and group work is still largely a 'lottery' experience for students at university.</p><p>This paper is about finding a way (or ways) to disrupt this cycle of repetition, not by raising the Titanic (for this has been tried), nor by terminating the Volkswagen (Woody Allen pointed out in the film <em>Sleepers</em> that they were clearly unstoppable). Rather, this paper will concentrate on how to re-engineer collaborative group work practices using online learning technologies, thereby enhancing their role as an effective, flexible and efficient learning exchange. In comparing the performance outcomes of 'online' learning groups to a study of 'real time' learning groups (Hogan 1999), the paper sets about building a case for the former. The paper deals specifically with how collaborative online learning groups can be used to:</p><ul><li>Establish an authentic learning context</li><li>Accommodate learner needs</li><li>Enrich learner experiences; and</li><li>Inform instructor perspectives.</li></ul>

A Review of WTA/WTP Studies

The difference between willingness to pay (WTP) and willingness to accept (WTA) has been widely studied both through theory and experiments. In a typical experiment, a subject is given some item, like a coffee mug, and offered money to return it to the experimenter. The dollar amount the subject asks for is his WTA. Another subject is not given a mug and instead asked to pay for one. The amount he offers is his WTP. Previous authors have shown that WTA is usually substantially larger than WTP and almost all have remarked that the WTA/WTP ratio is much higher than their economic intuition would predict. The pervasiveness of high WTA/WTP ratios and the wide variety of goods that have been used in the experiments have combined to sustain interest in WTA vs. WTP for roughly thirty years. This paper reviews those studies. We found 45 studies that reported usable data. The studies draw on a remarkable range of goods: chocolates, pens, mugs, movie tickets, hunting licenses, visibility, nuclear waste repositories, nasty-tasting liquids, pathogen-contaminated sandwiches, and many others. To our knowledge, no other economic issue has been experimentally studied across such a wide variety of goods. We concentrate on two issues. First, it has seemed possible that the high observed ratios are due to weak experimental features such as hypothetical payments, student subjects, or elicitation questions that are not incentive compatible. According to this argument, more realistic experiments, such as those with real money or incentive compatible elicitation, will yield lower and more reasonable ratios. We examine the evidence for this claim. Second, we ask: For which goods is a high ratio most likely to be found? With regard to experiment design, we find that ratios in real experiments are not significantly different from hypothetical experiments, and that incentive compatible elicitation yields higher ratios, not lower. In other words, survey techniques that would be expected to yield a truer picture of preferences lead either to no change or to higher observed ratios. We also found that students tended to have lower, not higher, ratios than the general public. The evidence on the effects of repetition is mixed; there is not strong evidence that the ratio decreases as subject repeat an experiment. We conclude that high WTA/WTP ratios are not the result of experimental design features that would be considered suspect even apart from their WTA/WTP results. With regard to patterns in the observed ratios, we find that, on average, the less the good is like an market good, the higher is the ratio. The ratio is highest for public and non-market goods, next highest for ordinary private goods, and lowest for experiments involving forms of money. A generalization of this pattern holds even when we account for differences in survey design: Ordinary goods have lower ratios than non-ordinary ones. This pattern is the major result we discover.

Satisfying Patients Goes Deeper than Shortening Waits

Patients in emergency departments at three suburban Michigan hospitals — Oakwood Hospital and Medical Center in Dearborn, Oakwood Annapolis Hospital in Wayne, and Oakwood Heritage Hospital in Taylor — received a promise from hospital officials recently. They would be seen by a physician and have their treatment begun within 30 minutes or they would receive a personal apology and a pair of movie tickets.

Prosocial values and group assortation : Within an N-person prisoner's dilemma game.

Ninety-five freshmen each recruited three peers to play a "group bidding game," an N-person prisoner's dilemma in which anyone could win movie tickets depending on their scores in the game. Prior to playing, all participants completed a measure of prosocial value orientation. Replicating and extending earlier findings (Sheldon and McGregor 2000), our results show that prosocial participants were at a disadvantage within groups. Despite this vulnerability, prosocial participants did no worse overall than asocial participants because a counteracting group-level advantage arose for prosocials, who tended to be concentrated in groups. Implications of this assortative process for the egoism/altruism debate, and for hierarchical selection theory, are discussed.

Now it's 2000: Trends in doing and being in the new millennium

From the middle of the twentieth century the year 2000 has been a metaphor for the future. But now the magic year has arrived and we have the opportunity to retrospectively assess forecasts made last century. This paper uses information from Australian time use surveys to examine the predictions made in 1983 by Jonathon Gershuny. Gershuny proposes that households have a hierarchy of needs and wants that they wish to satisfy. As societies get richer they devote a smaller proportion of their national incomes to satisfying the more basic needs, and a larger share to the more sophisticated, luxury categories. However, over time, there is an increasing gap in the relative market prices of durable goods and luxury final services. This means that final services bought on the market (such as opera tickets, theatre tickets, even movie tickets) become more expensive compared to the cost of producing these services at home using relatively inexpensive appliances (e.g. stereo sound systems, video recorders and so on). In other words households turn to ‘self‐service’. On this basis, Gershuny predicts a decline in time devoted to paid work and an increase in time spent in unpaid work and in leisure consumption. Fortunately, however, time spent in unpaid work is itself reduced by the increasing productivity of domestic appliance (durables) and an increasingly equitable division of domestic labour. The net result is a society of greater leisure. This paper argues that Gershuny's predictions have gone astray because of two key weaknesses ‐ his failure to consider the effect of labour demand on the distribution of hours of paid work and his neglect of bargaining over the domestic division of labour.

The Effects of a Group Reinforcement Contingency on Staff Use of Unscheduled Sick Leave

A multiple baseline design was used to examine the effects of a lottery-based group reinfokement contingency on the use of unscheduled sick leave bv residential treatment workers. Sixty direct-care workers participaied in this study. Researchers employed a group contingency that required workers to meet two-week absence criterion levels in order to participate in a subsequent drawing for prizes. The workers who won the lottery chose one of four rewards including 20 dollars in cash, four hours paid time off, paid lunch with a supervisor, or four movie tickets for use at local theatres. The mean number of unscheduled sick leave hours used in each of five work units was reduced during intervention; and mean reductions ranged from 30% to 80% of baseline levels.

Effects of Grouped and Individual Feedback and Feinforcement on Retail Employee Performances

Using a modified withdrawal design, the effeciveness of grouped feedback, individual feedback, and reinforcement plus individual feedback were assessed on cashier precision, punctuality, and money check-out proficiency of 15 part-time employees in a retail drugstore. Publicly posted performance charts were used during all conditions to inform employees of their grouped or individual daily discrepancies between cash register cumulative totals and the actual amount accounted for, the tardiness figures, and the manner in which all daily money was checked into the safe. The final intervention also included contingent reinforcement in the form of movie tickets, soft drinks, and candy bars for performances at or above criterion levels. The use of individual feedback alone and reinforcement with individual feedback increased efficiency substantially in all three areas; whereas, grouped feedback alone did not effectively increase efficiency.

The impact of anticipated reward upon cross-age tutoring.

The interpersonal interaction and task performance of children were assessed in a cross-age tutoring situation. In the reward condition, 12 sixth-grade girls were promised movie tickets for successfully teaching a sorting game to a first-grade girl. In the no-reward condition, children taught the game without promise of reward. Children were randomly assigned to pairs and conditions. The results indicated more criticism, more demands, and less efficacious use of time in the reward condition. The no-reward condition was marked by a more positive emotional tone, greater learning by the younger children, and fewer errors. The results are viewed as evidence that anticipation of reward generates an instrumental orientation that has deleterious social effects. How does the promise of reward for engaging in an activity affect the attitude and behavior of an individual? The general finding of four previous experiments (Deci, 1972; Kruglanski, Friedman, and Zeevi, 1971; Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973; Condry & Chambers, Note 1; Smith, Note 2) have suggested that the promise of a reward (prize) for engaging in an activity in which one has a relatively high level of initial intrinsic interest is associated with subsequent deterioration of interest and, in one study, competence in that activity. The previous research, however, has raised many questions, perhaps more than it has answered. It appeared that the most important area for further investigation lay in the mechanisms through which anticipated reward affected motivation and performance. It was assumed that the effects would be most significant in situations involving contingent reward. These previous studies have dealt with essentially nonsocial tasks. The focus has principally been on interest and cognitive performance in the task, with performance being assessed by tests of memory, creativity, and manipulative tasks. The present study investigated a different type of situation, one stressing social interaction. Whereas previous research has focused on cognitive characteristics of the relation between subject and task, the present

The effect on dissonance of surprise consequences

The hypothesis that volition in commitment is a sufficient condition for later negative consequences to create dissonance has not been supported by recent evidence. The more specific hypothesis that the magnitude of dissonance aroused by a commitment will be reduced or increased by subsequent, unexpected, positive and negative consequences, respectively, was suggested and tested in the following way. Under the guise of consumer research, subjects were given a choice between two attractive LP records. Some of the subjects were forewarned that by selecting the right record they could also win two free movie tickets, while other subjects were not forewarned. After the choice, half of the forewarned and half of the unforewarned subjects learned that they had won two free movie tickets by their selection of a record, while the other half learned that they had not won the two free tickets by their selection. A control condition without mention of tickets established the amount of dissonance reduction from the choice per se. A measure of change in attractiveness of the records from before and after the choice indicated that the magnitude of dissonance was affected by winning or not winning the tickets only when subjects were forewarned. It was concluded that surprise consequences probably do not affect the magnitude of pre-existent dissonance and that “felt responsibility” for consequences may be an appropriate concept for understanding the relevant evidence.

The Postwar French Cinema

in a state of chronic crisis for the last thirty years. The industry operates on a very narrow basis in France. In a country where half the population lives in the country or in small villages, there are relatively few motion picture theaters, and attendance is limited. For every Frenchman buying one movie ticket, an Englishman buys five or six, an American eight or ten; moreover, the price of admission is three to five times greater in England and America than it is in France. Before 1914, in spite of its undeveloped home market, France had a quasi-monopoly of international film trade. In 1908, according to George Eastman, founder of the Kodak enterprises, the Pathe Company alone was selling twice as many films in the United States as all the American producers put together. But the young American industry soon dominated its home market, and then eliminated French competition in nearly all foreign countries. In 1920 the big companies in Paris, playing a losing game, liquidated their agencies and studios abroad, and relied on importing American, German, and Swedish films for part of their French revenue.

College Libraries Encourage Reading

N v vOWADAYS when we have the choice of thousands of volumes, including a representative selection of the great books in admirable series available at the price of a movie ticket, it is disconcerting to learn that reading in the average American home has been losing ground in its race with other leisure-time activities. A sample of the cultivated life of our citizenry in the 1g30's is given by Mr. R. L. Duffus in his volume Books. Their Place in a Democracy, em bodying the results of investigation into the publication and distribution of books. From evidence based on publishers' output and sales, publicand rental-library circulation figures, and a generous measure of guesswork, he concludes that the average American buys two books a year, borrows two from the public library, rents two from the rental collections, and borrows one a year from a friend, a possible total of seven books a year read by the average American. More reliable and illuminating in its details is the study of reading habits made by William S. Gray and Ruth Munroe, and reported in the book The Reading Interests and Habits of Adults. The writers of this book analyzed and summarized the work of a great many investigators who had studied reading habits in different parts of the country and with people of all ages, occupations, and interests. From this study, one learns that not one person in two ever reads any books at all, and that those who do devote less than half an hour a day to reading them. I should imagine that though this study is now aDout ten years old, the picture of reading habits is much the same today. In competition with newspaper and magazine reading, the movie, the radio, golf, bridge, and the automobile, books are apparently hardly in the running.' If books are lacking and book reading is negligible in the home, how about in our colleges? It is all too plain that there are powerful counterattractions to reading on the campus. In his genial, devastating way, President Dodds of Princeton calls attention to some of them: