Talent Agents Research Articles

Interplay of network structure and talent configuration on wealth dynamics.

The economic success of individuals is often determined by a combination of talent, luck, and assistance from others. We introduce an agent-based model that simultaneously considers talent, luck, and social interaction. This model allows us to explore how network structure (how agents interact) and talent distribution among agents affect the dynamics of capital accumulation through analytical and numerical methods. We identify a phenomenon that we call the "talent configuration effect," which refers to the influence of how talent is allocated to individuals (nodes) in the network. We analyze this effect through two key properties: talent assortativity (TA) and talent-degree correlation (TD). In particular, we focus ons three economic indicators: growth rate (n_{rate}), Gini coefficient (inequality: n_{Gini}), and meritocratic fairness (n_{LT}). This investigation helps us understand the interplay between talent configuration and network structure on capital dynamics. We find that, in the short term, positive correlations exist between TA and TD for all three economic indicators. Furthermore, the dominant factor influencing capital dynamics depends on the network topology. In scale-free networks, TD has a stronger influence on the economic indices than TA. Conversely, in lattice-like networks, TA plays a more significant role. Our findings address that high socioeconomic homophily can create a dilemma between growth and equality and that hub monopolization by a few highly talented agents makes economic growth strongly dependent on their performances.

Wealth Inequality and the Exploration of Novel Technologies

Abstract I investigate whether wealth inequality hinders the discovery of novel technologies in a competitive screening model. Agents can engage in exploration, which may lead to the discovery of superior technologies, but it is likely to waste time with inferior ones. Talented agents are better at weeding out inferior technologies, but talent is unobservable by lenders. When agents are poor, this causes an adverse selection problem whereby exploration is pursued by untalented agents rather than by talented ones. As economies become wealthier, the misallocation problem of talented agents weakens. Higher inequality worsens this misallocation problem when the economy is wealthy, but can increase efficiency in poor economies.

Historical Dictionary of the American Music Industry by Keith Hatschek and Veronica A. Wells

Reviewed by: Historical Dictionary of the American Music Industry by Keith Hatschek and Veronica A. Wells Robert Willey Historical Dictionary of the American Music Industry. By Keith Hatschek and Veronica A. Wells. (Historical Dictionaries of Professions and Industries.) Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. [xxiii, 360 p. ISBN 9781538111437 (hardcover), $95; ISBN 9781538111444 (e-book), price varies.] Acronyms and abbreviations, chronology, appendixes, bibliography. [End Page 434] This reference book gives a broad overview of how the popular-music industry has evolved in the United States in the last 250 years and includes entries covering the practices, terminology, concepts, careers, and representative pioneers who have created music and brought it to the public. One in a series of historical dictionaries published by Rowman & Littlefield, this volume follows the same format as the Historical Dictionary of Librarianship, presenting subject terms in bold while indicating where to find synonyms or related terms, which makes it easy to scan the pages and locate what is of interest. This cross referencing is of special value. For example, the reader is directed to see “DJ” for information about “Deejays”, and to also read about the “First Sale Doctrine” in the entry on “Copyright.” The conciseness of the entries makes it a valuable supplement to textbooks on the subject, where indexes help locate pages that include terms, but which can then be slow to find the references providing the information that is desired. Readers have become used to searching for information on the internet, but this book saves time by collecting consistently high-quality results that won’t become outdated. While the book is intended to be a dictionary on individual subjects, the fact that the authors have also incorporated many interesting facts that are not covered elsewhere makes it enjoyable to read it in spurts from start to end. Like others in the series, this Dictionary begins with four pages of abbreviations and acronyms, which would be helpful for deciphering the language in contracts, for example. This is followed by a nine-page chronology of developments over a wide range of topics, including technology (radio, records, television, portable systems, networks), advertisers, festivals, and investors. I was happy to find many facts that a reader is unlikely to be aware of even if they are familiar with the field—for example, that the first commercial radio was installed in an automobile in 1930 and that the cast of Hair (which opened on Broadway in 1968) performed at the March on Washington. This timeline often reveals the synchronicity between multiple events in the same year. The next section is a thirty-two-page condensed history that provides an excellent overview of the music industry. A slower reading pace is required, since it packed with information, and many facts are delivered in succession without a lot of transitional passages. The authors begin with the colonial era and proceed through minstrelsy (where the pattern of cultural appropriation in American popular music of African American culture began), vaudeville, and how advances in printing, the expansion of the postal service, and affordable sheet music led to the rise of Tin Pan Alley publishers. Printed scores became less important as radio became popular, and the teen market created by baby boomers and advertising fueled the birth of rock and roll. Music popular with teenagers in the 1960s became mainstream; later festivals and corporations made it more of a commodity, and video made it a more visual medium. The drop in record sales in the last twenty years made live-performance revenue more important. The book was released just before the COVID-19 pandemic, making it a useful snapshot of the industry just before it began to increasingly shift to online experiences. The bulk of the work rests in the more than five hundred entries. The authors achieved a good balance between presenting information on individuals responsible for music and those instrumental for how it is sold. Readers on the outside of the industry will be more familiar with the names of artists and bands than those of record-label executives, managers, talent agents, [End Page 435] producers, inventors, promoters, and DJs who work behind the scenes. The focus is on the popular-music industry...

The allocation of talent: Finance versus entrepreneurship

The rapid growth of US financial services coupled with rapid increases in wealth inequality have been focusing policy debate as to the function of the financial sector and on its social desirability as a whole. I propose a heterogeneous agent model with asymmetric information and matching frictions that produces a tradeoff between finance and entrepreneurship. By becoming bankers, talented agents efficiently match investors with entrepreneurs, but extract excessive informational rents due to contract incompleteness. Thus the financial sector is inefficiently large in equilibrium, and this inefficiency increases with wealth inequality. The estimated model with time variation in the banker capacity accounts for the simultaneous growth of wealth inequality and the financial sector in the US. The endogenous feedback between inequality and the size of the financial sector is quantitatively important.

Wealth and the principal–agent matching

AbstractI study the role the agent's wealth plays in the principal–agent matching with moral hazard and limited liability. I consider wealth and talent as the agent's type and size as the firm's (principal's) type. Wealthier agents match with bigger firms, when talent is homogeneous among them, whereas for equally wealthy agents, more talented agents will match with bigger firms. I describe economic conditions over types such that pairs of higher types will write contracts in which the agent gets more than the limited liability rents. Finally, I write conditions on wealth for assortative matching in talent to hold.

Incentives, ability and disutility of effort

We generalize the disutility of effort function in the linear-Constant Absolute Risk Aversion (CARA) pure moral hazard model. We assume that agents are heterogeneous in ability. Each agent’s ability is observable and treated as a parameter that indexes the disutility of effort associated with the task performed. In opposition to the literature (the “traditional” scenario), we find a new, “novel” scenario, in which a high-ability agent may be offered a weaker incentive contract than a low-ability one, but works harder. We characterize the conditions for the existence of these two scenarios: formally, the “traditional” (“novel”) scenario occurs if and only if the marginal rate of substitution of the marginal disutility of effort function is increasing (decreasing) in effort when evaluated at the second-best effort. If, further, this condition holds for all parameter values and matching is endogenous, less (more) talented agents work for principals with riskier projects in equilibrium. This implies that the indirect and total effects of risk on incentives are negative under monotone assortative matching.

Omnivorous Careers in Small Markets: An Industry Perspective on Acting

ABSTRACT The article proposes a conceptual framework for studying mutual relationships between media markets and acting career patterns. It draws on valuation theory of cultural intermediaries, which presumes that intermediaries are actively creating value and socially constructing markets. The Czech acting job market is considered as an example of a small, peripheral market lacking a fully developed and standardised intermediary sector of talent agents and managers. This has had an impact on acting careers in terms of actors’ strategic choices and the stratification of the market, leading, among other things, to what the article labels ‘omnivorous careers’.

Flavonoids and Polyphenolic Compounds as Potential Talented Agents for the Treatment of Alzheimers Disease and their Antioxidant Activities

Bentham Science - STM publisher of online and print journals, and related print/online book series. Bentham Science answers the information needs of scientists in the fields of pharmaceutical, biomedical, medical, engineering, technology, computer and social sciences.

Flavonoids and Polyphenolic Compounds as Potential Talented Agents for the Treatment of Alzheimer's Disease and their Antioxidant Activities.

Aging is a normal human cycle and the most important risk factor for neurodegenerative diseases. Alternations in cells due to aging contribute to loss of the nutrient-sensing, cell function, increased oxidative stress, loss of the homeostasis cell, genomic instability, the build-up of malfunctioning proteins, weakened cellular defenses, and a telomere split. Disturbance of these essential cellular processes in neuronal cells can lead to life threats including Alzheimer's disease (AD), Huntington's disease (HD), Lewy's disease, etc. The most common cause of death in the elderly population is AD. Specific therapeutic molecules were created to alleviate AD's social, economic, and health burden. In clinical practice, almost every chemical compound was found to relieve symptoms only in palliative treatment. The reason behind these perfect medicines is that the current medicines are not effective in targeting the cause of this disease. In this paper, we explored the potential role of flavonoid and polyphenolic compounds, which could be the most effective preventative anti-Alzheimer's strategy.

Sending Agents to the Principal’s Office: How Talent Agency Packaging and Producing Breach the Fiduciary Duties Agents Owe Their Artist-Clients

Author(s): Smith, Brian T. | Abstract: Talent agents have always been indispensable to writers, actors, and other creative workers in the entertainment industry, providing independent representation to their artist-clients in dealings with sophisticated corporate employers. But following a historical shift in their revenues from commissioning clients to lucrative television packaging fees, the power and profits of the biggest agencies grew exponentially. Revenues from packaging fees allowed these agencies to diversify into other businesses and attracted outside investment by private equity firms leading to further vertical integration. Now, the largest agencies have turned their eye toward a new revenue stream: producing and owning content through agency-affiliate production companies. These innovations have come at the cost of the independent representation agents are supposed to provide their clients. Packaging and producing by talent agencies and their affiliates breach the well-established fiduciary duties agents owe their clients under the law by aligning the agency’s own interests with the interests of its clients’ employers. Outside investment in the agencies only exacerbates these conflicts. These departures from traditional agenting undermine the avowed purpose of the California Talent Agencies Act: to protect vulnerable artists from the conflicted practices of their agents. While these issues are at the heart of the ongoing industry dispute between the Writers Guild of America and the big agencies, their importance should concern all agency clients and their unions. The California Legislature should amend the outdated Talent Agencies Act to enumerate and reaffirm the fiduciary duties talent agents owe their clients under common law and prevent the erosion of legal protections for creative workers in one of the state’s largest and most important industries.

Talent Agents and the Implications of Actor Placement

This article analyses what is at stake when talent agents place actors in television dramas and series, the production and consumption of which have gained increased cultural legitimacy in France over the past ten years. I will examine the mechanisms of valorization used by agents to arrange these placements and to defend the interests of their clientele. Next, I will analyse the stakes and customs surrounding these placements in terms of professional socialization within the context of the industrial organization of work. Finally, I will look at how the competition created by movie actors’ entry into the space of television redistributes symbolic and material profits within the job market for television series. Drawing on interviews with agents, I will explain how the television series genre has gained increased status in the job market for actors over the past decade.

Indian intermediaries in new media: Mainstreaming the margins

This article foregrounds the significant transformations within the nature and role of Indian intermediaries such as talent agents and multichannel networks (hereafter, MCNs) in the new screen ecology. Building on previous findings (Cunningham and Craig, 2019; Boyle, 2018 ; Lobato, 2016; Roussel, 2017 ), I contend that intermediaries exercise a strong influence over streaming platforms as well as content creators through role playing as producers, facilitators and enablers of media talent and content. Through diversification in media management activities across traditional and new media, the intermediaries have successfully readjusted their image from marginalized invisible middlemen to proactive media industry trendsetters. The MCNs and talent agents have been instrumental in developing revenue circuits through their distinct industrial and cultural practices. In doing so, both these entities have diversified from their defined business operations to create their niche by identifying the demands of the evolving Indian media landscape. In charting out their evolving dynamics, my study critically analyses intermediary transactions to offer a revisionist account of their industrial practices.

The allure of celebrities: unpacking their polysemic consumer appeal

Purpose This paper aims to explain a celebrity’s deep resonance with consumers by unpacking the individual constituents of a celebrity’s polysemic appeal. While celebrities are traditionally theorised as unidimensional semiotic receptacles of cultural meaning, the authors conceptualise them here instead as human beings/performers with a multi-constitutional, polysemic consumer appeal. Design/methodology/approach Supporting evidence is drawn from autoethnographic data collected over a total period of 25 months and structured through a hermeneutic analysis. Findings In rehumanising the celebrity, the study finds that each celebrity offers the individual consumer a unique and very personal parasocial appeal as the performer, the private person behind the public performer, the tangible manifestation of either through products and the social link to other consumers. The stronger these constituents, individually or symbiotically, appeal to the consumer’s personal desires, the more s/he feels emotionally attached to this particular celebrity. Research limitations/implications Although using autoethnography means that the breadth of collected data is limited, the depth of insight this approach garners sufficiently unpacks the polysemic appeal of celebrities to consumers. Practical implications The findings encourage talent agents, publicists and marketing managers to reconsider underlying assumptions in their talent management and/or celebrity endorsement practices. Originality/value While prior research on celebrity appeal has tended to enshrine celebrities in a “dehumanised” structuralist semiosis, which erases the very idea of individualised consumer meanings, this paper reveals the multi-constitutional polysemy of any particular celebrity’s personal appeal as a performer and human being to any particular consumer.

Representing Talent: Hollywood Agents and the Making of Movies by Violaine Roussel (review)

Reviewed by: Representing Talent: Hollywood Agents and the Making of Movies by Violaine Roussel Laurel Carlson Violaine Roussel, Representing Talent: Hollywood Agents and the Making of Movies. University of Chicago Press, 2017. 256 pages. Violaine Roussel’s Representing Talent: Hollywood Agents and the Making of Movies displays the unique role of talent agents in the media industry through a revealing and thorough ethnographic study. The Hollywood agent is a figure frequently shrouded in mystery, often only understood via shoddy film and television portrayals (e.g. Tootsie’s George Fields or Friends’ Estelle). These portrayals have led to the stereotyping of agents as greedy, ruthless, and parasitic. Even in academic circles, little attention has been paid to the role of the agent in the media industry as a whole. Roussel seeks to investigate this singular profession, a feat that she manages with sophistication by using 122 interviews, performed between 2010 and 2015, with agents of a wide variety of backgrounds and experience. Though the interviewees remain anonymous – and for good reason – Roussel’s fieldwork reveals the complicated and hierarchized relationships that exist between agents and their clients, between agents and other Hollywood production workers, and between agents themselves. In so doing, Roussel draws a complex yet accessible map of where agents stand in the context of Hollywood media production. By intervening into a gap in Production Studies scholarship, Roussel demonstrates the importance of understanding “agenting,” as it is referred to in the industry, in order to make sense of how films and television shows come to be produced in Hollywood. Roussel opens her book with a prologue that traces the development of [End Page 55] Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991) from the sale of the rights to Thomas Harris’ source novel in the late 1980s up to the official start of the film’s production. Roussel argues that despite all the work that goes into a film’s development, it is only on the first day of production that a film becomes “real.” This case study demonstrates the tricky orchestration involved in a Hollywood agent’s work and maps out the winding road of negotiation that often takes place before a film goes into production. Following the prologue, each of Roussel’s seven chapters investigates a different aspect of the world of the Hollywood talent agent, including how agents work their way up in the industry, the importance of relationships in the profession, the complicated power structures between agents and their clients, the logic behind “pricing talent” and actors’ fees, and the changing structure of the profession due to the emerging importance of the indie film market and digital media. Among these chapters, the notion of “relationship work” emerges as a critical site for the development of the agent’s career. Roussel stresses that strong relationships with firm boundaries constitute the lifeblood of Hollywood agents and that the creation of a network of trust as well as a personal “agenting style” are key to “making it” as an agent in the industry. Roussel delineates the difference between “Big Hollywood” and “Little Hollywood” in the agency system as “two distinct systems of cultural production” (29). While Big Hollywood includes the major agencies that dominate the system, Little Hollywood includes a vast number of smaller and less lucrative agencies. Roussel’s book is effective because she pays attention to both sides of the agency system by including interviews with members of both arenas. Because movement between Big and Little Hollywood does occur, these systems are distinct yet interconnected. Roussel’s overall arguments about the agency system hold significantly more weight because she isn’t merely addressing the major agencies that represent Hollywood’s biggest stars; she demonstrates an understanding of the small and boutique agencies that are often ignored in Production Studies and Media Studies. Representing Talent includes an interesting investigation into the demographics of the agency system by noting that in accordance with stereotypes, Hollywood agents are predominantly white and male. Although women are finding more representation at the lower levels of the agent industry, men still make up the vast majority of high-level positions. While one could object that Roussel’s interview subjects are predominantly white and...

Heterogeneous human capital, inequality and growth: The role of patience and skills

AbstractWe extend the Lucas (1988) model, introducing two classes of agents with heterogeneous skills, discount factors and initial human capital endowments. We consider two regimes according to the planner's political constraints. In the meritocratic regime, the planner faces individual constraints. In the redistributive regime, the planner faces an aggregate constraint. We find that heterogeneity matters, particularly with redistribution. In the meritocratic regime, the optimal solution coincides with the balanced growth path (BGP) found by Lucas (1988) for the representative agent's case. In contrast, in the case of redistribution, the solution for time devoted to capital accumulation is never interior for both agents. Either the less talented agents do not accumulate human capital or the more skilled agents do not work. Moreover, social welfare under the redistributive regime is always higher than under meritocracy, and it is optimal to exploit existing differences. Finally, we find that inequality in human capital distribution increases in time and that, in the long run, inequality always promotes growth.

Learning from the professionals: film tourists’ “authentic” experiences on a film studio tour

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore how consumers perceive, experience and engage with the art of filmmaking and the industrial film production process that the film studios present to them during their guided film studio tours.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on the author’s own film tourist experiences, observations and participatory interactions with fellow visitors at a major Hollywood film studio, this paper takes an autoethnographic “I’m-the-camera”-perspective and a hermeneutic data analysis approach.FindingsThe findings reveal that visitors experience the “authentic” representation of the working studio’s industrial film production process as an opportunity and “invitation to join” a broader filmmaker community and to share their own amateur filmmaking experiences with fellow visitors and professionals – just to discover eventually that the perceived community is actually the real “simulacrum”.Research limitations/implicationsAlthough using an autoethnographic approach means that the breadth of collected data is limited, the gain in depth of insights allows for a deeper understanding of the actual visitor experience.Practical implicationsThe findings encourage film studio executives, managers and talent agents to reconsider current practices and motivations in delivering film studio tours and to explore avenues for harnessing their strategic potential.Originality/valueContrary to previous studies that have conceptualised film studio tours as simulacra that deny consumers a genuine access to the backstage, the findings of this study suggest that the real simulacrum is actually the film tourists’ “experienced feeling” of having joined and being part of a filmmaker community, which raises question regarding the study of virtual communities.

The Allocation of Talent: Finance Versus Entrepreneurship

The rapid growth of US financial services coupled with rapid increases in wealth inequality have been focusing policy debate on the function of the financial sector and on its social desirability as a whole. I propose a heterogeneous agent model with asymmetric information and matching frictions that produces a tradeoff between finance and entrepreneurship. By becoming bankers, talented agents efficiently match investors with entrepreneurs but extract excessive informational rents due to contract incompleteness. Thus, the financial sector is inefficiently large in equilibrium, and this inefficiency increases with wealth inequality. The model explains the simultaneous growth of wealth inequality and finance in the US, and why more unequal countries have larger financial sectors.

Wealth and the Principal-Agent Matching

I study the role the agent's wealth plays in the principal-agent matching with moral hazard and limited liability. I consider wealth and talent as the agent's type, and size as the firm's (principal's) type. Because utility is not perfectly transferable in this setup, I use generalized increasing differences and find that wealthier agents match with bigger firms, when talent is homogeneous among them, whereas for equally wealthy agents, more talented agents will match with bigger firms. I describe economic conditions over types such that pairs of higher types will write contracts in which the agent obtains more than the information rents, through a higher bonus, increasing the expected surplus. Finally, I provide an example in which wealth is distributed among agents in such a way that it reverses the standard result of positive assortative matching between talent and firm size.

The cultural logic of digital intermediaries

How has YouTube evolved as a cultural and commercial infrastructure? What institutional forms has it produced? The present article takes up these questions through a discussion of multichannel networks (MCNs) and their role within the digital video system. MCNs are a new breed of intermediary firm that link entrepreneurial YouTubers with the advertising, marketing and screen production industries. This article considers the functions of MCNs vis-à-vis the existing constellation of screen industry professions, including talent agents, managers and media buyers, who perform similar functions offline. Combining structural analysis of the MCN industry with an assessment of its cultural impacts, I show how Google’s decision to open the YouTube back-end to third-party intermediaries is subtly changing the digital video ecology.

Who Are You Going After? A Practical Typology to Generate Engagement in Professional Student Organizations

On the basis of experiential learning theory and Cialdini’s principles of influence, two psychological streams focused on providing hands-on experiences and on effectively influencing individuals, this article identifies a typology of students to engage them in professional student organizations. Exploratory factor analysis and cluster analysis tests were used to uncover the typology in which 3 distinct segments were identified and named: motivated advocates, uncovered talent, and indifferent agents. Identifying and understanding each segment can lead faculty advisors to more effective marketing and engagement of students by better understanding the value that students place in being active members of professional student organizations.