Box Office Buzz: Does Social Media Data Steal the Show from Model Uncertainty When Forecasting for Hollywood?

Steven Lehrer () and Tian Xie

No 22959, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Substantial excitement currently exists in industry regarding the potential of using analytic tools to measure sentiment in social media messages to help predict individual reactions to a new product, including movies. However, the majority of models subsequently used for forecasting exercises do not allow for model uncertainty. Using data on the universe of Twitter messages, we use an algorithm that calculates the sentiment regarding each film prior to, and after its release date via emotional valence to understand whether these opinions affect box office opening and retail movie unit (DVD and Blu-Ray) sales. Our results contrasting eleven different empirical strategies from econometrics and penalization methods indicate that accounting for model uncertainty can lead to large gains in forecast accuracy. While penalization methods do not outperform model averaging on forecast accuracy, evidence indicates they perform just as well at the variable selection stage. Last, incorporating social media data is shown to greatly improve forecast accuracy for box-office opening and retail movie unit sales.

JEL-codes: C52 C53 M21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-for and nep-pay
Note: TWP
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published as Steven Lehrer & Tian Xie, 2017. "Box Office Buzz: Does Social Media Data Steal the Show from Model Uncertainty When Forecasting for Hollywood?," The Review of Economics and Statistics, vol 99(5), pages 749-755.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22959.pdf (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:nbr:nberwo:22959

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22959

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().