Experts, Information, Reviews, and Coordination: Evidence on How Prizes Affect Sales*

Nicolas Lagios and Pierre-Guillaume Méon

ULB Institutional Repository from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles

Abstract: Exploiting the award process, we implement a regression discontinuity design to estimate the effect of winning France's main literary prize, the Goncourt. It increases sales, especially for books that sold fewer copies before the announcement, the number of reviews on Amazon, and the probability of them being negative. The effect is partly driven by an increase in word of mouth. Those findings are consistent with a model where the prize provides information on the existence of a book and acts as a quality signal and a coordination device but prompts consumers to read books that are far from their tastes.

Date: 2024-03-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul
Note: SCOPUS: ar.j
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in: Journal of industrial economics (2024) v.72 n° 1,p.49-80

Downloads: (external link)
https://dipot.ulb.ac.be/dspace/bitstream/2013/3720 ... tJIndusEpreprint.pdf Œuvre complète ou partie de l'œuvre (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Experts, Information, Reviews, and Coordination: Evidence on How Prizes Affect Sales (2024)
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:ulb:ulbeco:2013/372011

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://hdl.handle.ne ... lb.ac.be:2013/372011

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ULB Institutional Repository from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Benoit Pauwels (bpauwels@ulb.ac.be).