סמינר בשיווק

Peter McGraw , University of Colorado Boulder

Editing is essential to entertainment product development. Entertainment producers improve product quality in post-production by cutting low-quality elements (e.g., boring jokes) and keeping high-quality elements (e.g., funny jokes). Yet, consumers too often encounter less-than-enjoyable moments while consuming entertainment. We show how industry length constraints (e.g., 22-minute sitcoms; one-hour comedy specials) alter producers’ editing decisions and diminish product quality. Producers keep some bad content when the amount of good content fails to reach a minimum length. Conversely, producers cut some good content when the amount of good content exceeds a maximum length. Because consumers are more sensitive to the presence of negativity than the absence of positivity, we find that keeping bad content (due to a minimum constraint) diminishes product quality more than cutting good content (due to a maximum constraint). As a real-world case, we propose that a 90-minute minimum constraint required by studios hurts Hollywood movies. Filmmakers who lack enough good scenes to reach a 90-minute running time cannot cut some bad scenes, which causes an over-representation of short bad movies.