Judgment Aggregation in Creative Production: Evidence from the Movie Industry

Hong Luo (), Jeffrey Macher () and Michael Wahlen ()
Additional contact information
Hong Luo: Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts 02163
Jeffrey Macher: McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057
Michael Wahlen: MIT Sloan School of Management, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142

Management Science, 2021, vol. 67, issue 10, 6358-6377

Abstract: We study a novel, low-cost approach to aggregating judgment from a large number of industry experts on ideas that they encounter in their normal course of business. Our context is the movie industry, in which customer appeal is difficult to predict and investment costs are high. The Black List, an annual publication, ranks unproduced scripts based on anonymous nominations from film executives. This approach entails an inherent trade-off: Low participation costs enable high response rates, but nominations lack standard criteria, and which voters see which ideas is unobservable and influenced by various factors. Despite these challenges, we find that such aggregation is predictive: Listed scripts are substantially more likely to be released than observably similar, but unlisted, scripts, and, conditional on release and investment levels, listed scripts generate higher box-office revenues. We also find that this method mitigates entry barriers for less-experienced writers, as (i) their scripts are more likely to be listed than those by experienced writers and to rank higher if listed and (ii) within scripts by less-experienced writers, being listed is associated with a higher release rate. Yet, the gap in release probabilities relative to experienced writers remains large, even for top-ranked scripts. These results can be explained by the premise that scripts from less-experienced writers are more visible among eligible voters than scripts from experienced writers. This highlights idea visibility as an important determinant of votes and surfaces the trade-offs, as well as potential limitations, associated with such methods.

Keywords: judgment aggregation; quality uncertainty; creative industry; project evaluation and selection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2020.3815 (application/pdf)

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:inm:ormnsc:v:67:y:2021:i:10:p:6358-6377

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Management Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().