The Influence of Expert Reviews on Consumer Demand for Experience Goods: A Case Study of Movie Critics*

Abstract

An inherent problem in measuring the influence of expert reviews on the demand for experience goods is that a correlation between good reviews and high demand may be spurious, induced by an underlying correlation with unobservable quality signals. Using the timing of the reviews by two popular movie critics, Siskel and Ebert, relative to opening weekend box office revenue, we apply a difference-in-differences approach to circumvent the problem of spurious correlation. After purging the spurious correlation, the measured influence effect is smaller though still detectable. Positive reviews have a particularly large influence on the demand for dramas and narrowly-released movies.

Influencing Experience: The Effects of Reading Game Reviews on Player Experience

“…Persuasive power has been explored in the domains of movies [18], e-commerce [20], advertising [23], and news [19]; however, there has been little investigation into the effect on player experience. Jenkins et al [8] studied the effects of showing a high, low, or no game score to players.…”

Cinematic success criteria and their predictors: The art and business of the film industry

“…Most researchers have identified a positive relation between the critics' judgments and box office success (e.g., Litman, 1983;Litman & Kohl, 1989;Sawhney & Eliasberg, 1996;Sochay, 1994). Nonetheless, some investigators have found no relationship (Delmestri, Montanari, & Usai, 2005;Reinstein & Snyder, 2005), still others have found a negative association (Hirschman & Pieros, 1985;Simonton, 2005a), or even a U-shaped curve (Wallace, Seigerman, & Holbrook, 1993). These contradictory results largely reflect the complexity of the phenomenon.…”

Determinants of UK Box Office Success: The Impact of Quality Signals

“…In the US, Reinstein and Snyder (2005) focused on the information contained in reviews by two celebrated US film critics who presented their evaluations on television. We must caution that the critics whose reviews are summarised here are certainly not household names.…”

“…Second, a positive review could simply be a proxy for film quality and so critical acclaim is a predictor of film success. Reinstein and Snyder (2005) distinguish empirically between these two functions of critics. They find a small but statistically significant influencing role for ratings for dramas and small-release films offered by two high-profile film critics in the US which they identify as an influence effect, with positive reviews having a significantly larger effect on revenues than negative or mixed reviews.…”

“…Some US research has highlighted the helpful role that positive reviews play in raising box office revenues (Eliashberg and Shugan, 1997;Reinstein and Snyder, 2005). As proposed by Eliashberg and Shugan, strong critical acclaim can mean either of two things.…”