More to Sell
Moral salience in film reviews associated with film success: An analysis of 1.6 million reviews
Jialing Huang, Janet Yang & Junjie Zhu
Journal of Media Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Moral reflection, a prevalent response to popular media, can play an important role in audience media appraisal. Employing a computational approach, this study examined the effect of moral salience in film reviews on film success. By analyzing moral words from the Moral Foundation Dictionary in a large corpus of approximately 1.6 million IMDb film reviews, we found that moral salience in reviews was strongly associated with film success. Specifically, the salience of moral foundations identified as care, fairness, loyalty, and authority was positively associated with audience ratings, popularity, and gross domestic revenue. These findings demonstrate the real-world implications of moral reflection and entertainment media appraisal postulated by entertainment media theories. This research also offers methodological insights for automated analysis of movie review data.
The cue-ball effect: How an advantaged firm's closer competitors can propagate the impact of its advantage to more distant competitors
Natarajan Balasubramanian, Richard Makadok & Wan-Ting Chiu
Strategic Management Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Cost advantage helps a firm at the expense of its rivals, but may hurt some rivals worse than others. Conventional wisdom suggests that an advantaged firm will do more harm to closer competitors, but the opposite may occur if competitors can reposition themselves. Closer competitors have stronger incentives to reposition away from the advantaged firm, thereby potentially encroaching on rivals more distant from the advantaged firm and propagating the harm to them like the cue ball in billiards transfers energy from cue stick to target ball. Our formal model compares an advantaged firm's closer and farther competitors, when repositioning is allowed or prohibited, and demonstrates when its advantage hurts farther competitors worse than closer ones. We provide an illustrative case study from grocery retailing.
One size fits all? The value of standardized retail chains
Ben Klopack
RAND Journal of Economics, Spring 2024, Pages 55-86
Abstract:
Multi-outlet firms, or chains, account for most US retail spending. This article quantifies the welfare and profit effects of standardized chains in the restaurant industry: chains face higher demand than independents, but are less flexible in customizing product selection or prices across locations. I find that on average chains could earn 19% higher variable profits if they could customize their product optimally, but they would lose 28% of their variable profits if they were to lose their demand advantages. Local policies that ban chains would decrease consumer welfare by 1.5% to 5.4% of restaurant spending and disproportionately impact lower income consumers.
Homebuyers' geographic proximity as a predictor of future housing price growth
Hayoung Kim
Real Estate Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Considering the prevalent information asymmetry in housing markets, this study demonstrates the predictive power of homebuyers' geographic proximity on housing prices. At the ZIP-code level, a 10-percentage-point increase in the fraction of local buyers corresponds to a 1.1-percentage-point higher housing price growth over the subsequent 2 years. At the individual level, out-of-town buyers experience a 0.64-percentage-point lower annual return compared to local buyers within a county. These results not only highlight the significant information advantages enjoyed by geographically proximate buyers, but also imply that informationally privileged buyers' revealed preferences for specific locations could provide informationally disadvantaged buyers with hints about which areas are likely to experience higher housing price growth in the near future.
For those about to rock... is stability a determinant of rock bands success?
Etienne Farvaque
Journal of Cultural Economics, March 2024, Pages 145-166
Abstract:
I make use of the characteristics of more than 6000 rock bands to empirically analyze if and how the stability of their members helps them to get a higher level of success. Bands cover all genres of Rock music (from Country to Punk), and their performance is assessed by having a song ranked in Billboard 100. Analyzing how the turn-over of members of a band affects their performance, it appears that the total number of musicians that left the band (compared to the actual number of musicians) -- used as an indicator of instability -- positively impacts the probability of a success. This may reveal that more talented musicians tend to be recruited after the departure of founding members, or that new members bring fresh ideas. The latter interpretation is supported by another result, showing that solo artists have a higher probability of success than bands. Finally, I also show that bands that come back to the stage after a split do not perform better.
The Effect of Florida's Sales Tax Repeal on the Price of Menstrual Hygiene Products: Using Synthetic Control Methods
Myoungji Yang
Rice University Working Paper, February 2024
Abstract:
This paper investigates the effect of the 2018 repeal of 6% sales tax on menstrual hygiene products price in Florida using detailed purchase data and the synthetic control method. I find that the price per one menstrual hygiene product (a tampon or a pad) dropped in Florida after the repeal, and the magnitude of the price drop was larger for the low-income than for the high-income consumers. These price reductions amount to 6.7% and 4.7% of the pre-repeal prices for each income group, respectively. The changes in prices were significant at conventional statistical significance level and were robust to the change in study design. The difference in price drop magnitude possibly stems from the fact that the two income groups use different products, and retailers price-discriminate against different income groups. While the low-income buys more store brand products which are cheaper than national brand counterparts, the high-income buys more of national brand products.