THE INFLUENCE OF EXPERT REVIEWS ON CONSUMER DEMAND FOR EXPERIENCE GOODS: A CASE STUDY OF MOVIE CRITICS*

David Reinstein () and Christopher Snyder

Journal of Industrial Economics, 2005, vol. 53, issue 1, 27-51

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.

Date: 2005
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (183)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0022-1821.2005.00244.x

Related works:
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:bla:jindec:v:53:y:2005:i:1:p:27-51

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0022-1821

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Industrial Economics is currently edited by Pierre Regibeau, Yeon-Koo Che, Kenneth Corts, Thomas Hubbard, Patrick Legros and Frank Verboven

More articles in Journal of Industrial Economics from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().