Hollywood Models

Hollywood Models assembles in a single volume recent research that empirically analyzes the motion-picture industry. The book provides a toolkit of sorts for those who wish to study the movie business using empirical models that explicitly account for the extreme uncertainty that characterizes the movie business. This book collects the author s most important recent contributions to the field of film industry studies for the purpose of making accessible to students, academics, and industry practitioners the proper empirical techniques to use in quantitative modeling of the movie business. After introducing the reader to statistical techniques that properly account for heavy tails and skewness, infinite variance, and investigator uncertainty about model specification, the techniques are applied to a variety of film-industry issues including piracy, audience contagion and film survival, particular film markets based on geography or genre, and finally to secondary film markets (including DVD) which are becoming increasingly important drivers of film industry profitability.