Is Rotten Tomatoes killing the movie industry? A regression discontinuity approach

Marislei Nishijima (), Mauro Rodrigues and Thais Luiza Donega Souza ()

No 2021_12, Working Papers, Department of Economics from University of São Paulo (FEA-USP)

Abstract: We study the effect of expert reviews on consumer choice, focusing on the movie industry. Specifically, we estimate the impact of a popular movie review aggregator – Rotten Tomatoes (RT) – on box office revenue, using a sample of 1,239 movies widely-released in the U.S. between 1999 and 2019. RT’s rating system allows us to use regression discontinuity, thus avoiding problems associated with omitted unobservable characteristics of movies (such as quality and commercial appeal). We do not find evidence that RT ratings affect box office performance.

Keywords: Expert reviews; Rotten Tomatoes; Movie industry; Films; Regression discontinuity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 C39 D8 D9 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-03-29
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.repec.eae.fea.usp.br/documentos/Nishijima_Rodrigues_Souza_12WP.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Is Rotten Tomatoes killing the movie industry? A regression discontinuity approach (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spa:wpaper:2021wpecon12

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers, Department of Economics from University of São Paulo (FEA-USP) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Pedro Garcia Duarte ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).