Something to Talk About: Social Spillovers in Movie Consumption

Duncan Sheppard Gilchrist and Emily Glassberg Sands

Journal of Political Economy, 2016, vol. 124, issue 5, 1339 - 1382

Abstract: We exploit the randomness of weather and the relationship between weather and moviegoing to quantify social spillovers in movie consumption. Instrumenting for early viewership with plausibly exogenous weather shocks captured in LASSO-chosen instruments, we find that shocks to opening weekend viewership are doubled over the following five weekends. Our estimated momentum arises almost exclusively at the local level, and we find no evidence that it varies with either ex post movie quality or the precision of ex ante information about movie quality, suggesting that the observed momentum is driven in part by a preference for shared experience, and not only by social learning.

Date: 2016
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