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Marketing Letters
Published in: Marketing Letters 1/2024

02-10-2023

On enjoying watching movies in a theatre versus at home: a comparative analysis

Authors: Jason Yiu-chung Ho, Jehoshua Eliashberg, Charles B. Weinberg, Berend Wierenga

Published in: Marketing Letters | Issue 1/2024

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Abstract

For most major movies, consumers have a choice to watch them in a theater or on home video. While each viewing channel has its own advantages and disadvantages, consumers are watching the same underlying product—a specific movie. An unanswered question is whether consumers enjoy watching a specific movie more in a theater or video setting. Using IMDb rating data, we find that for most wide-release movies, ratings are higher during the theater window than during the video window. The differences are particularly high for movies with relatively large production budgets and for sequels.
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Appendix
Available only for authorised users
Footnotes
1
Our key results remain if we change the length of both viewing windows to 1 month.
 
2
Our key results hold when we reduce the cutoff to at least 50 reviews per movie in each window.
 
3
We thank Aidan Lieberman for suggesting this analysis.
 
4
As a robustness check on our results, we also estimated a fixed effect (for each movie) model in which the variable VIDEO_RUN is included. The coefficient of VIDEO_RUN is negative and statistically significant. See the Online Appendix for these results.
 
5
To allow for the possibility that ratings may decline over time, in addition to the VIDEO_RUN variable, we added a variable to capture the decay rate in the theatre and video windows to models MLM1-5. We found that the decay rate for the theatre window was significant and negative, but that the coefficient of VIDEO_RUN was still negative and significant. See the Online Appendix.
 
6
Other papers, e.g., Godes and Silva (2012), treat product ratings as ordinal. As a robustness check, we follow Bauer and Sterba (2001) and run an estimation of multilevel cumulative logit model treating the ratings as ordinal for models MLM1–5 and find that the coefficient of VIDEO_RUN is negative and significant. The results for other independent variables are generally consistent. See the Online Appendix for these results.
 
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Metadata
Title
On enjoying watching movies in a theatre versus at home: a comparative analysis
Authors
Jason Yiu-chung Ho
Jehoshua Eliashberg
Charles B. Weinberg
Berend Wierenga
Publication date
02-10-2023
Publisher
Springer US
Published in
Marketing Letters / Issue 1/2024
Print ISSN: 0923-0645
Electronic ISSN: 1573-059X
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-023-09705-3

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