Every week, there are more than 50 movies playing in theaters from which movie-goers can choose. Analyses of the relative box office success of these films shows that it is Pareto-distributed, with roughly 20% of them earning 80% of the overall revenue. Arthur De Vany studied the potential causes of this 'winner-take-all' distribution through equation-based analyses, and theorized that the Pareto-distributed box office revenues we observe emerge from the micro-level complex adaptive behavior of movie-goers with imperfect information.;The literature is replete with attempts to explain how blockbuster movies occur, yet clearly none have found the secret formula. Several concluded a relationship between attributes and box office success through the information signaled or generated by the attribute, but all have suffered from an inability to separate the effect of movie attributes from the effect of word of mouth.;In this dissertation I created an agent-based model of movie attendance called ChatterMod, where movie-goers with heterogeneous and incomplete information choose from a supply of homogenous films devoid of 'preference' attributes (e.g. rating, genre, existence of stars) and then exchange information about the film with their neighbors. ChatterMod explains how the skewed macro-level distribution of box office revenues arises from a) a scale-free network of movie-goers with heterogeneous levels of movie awareness, b) each movie's revenue relative to existing films, c) the competition for movie-goer attention posed by information on new films, and d) the percolation of movie information throughout the network via word of mouth. In ChatterMod, there is no question as to whether or not a direct relationship between information and box office revenue exists, because there are no other attributes in the model that can affect that relationship. The model produced similar statistical behavior to prior empirical research and intuitive behavior when word of mouth and advertising were adjusted.;With this model, I provide a controlled laboratory for future research in movie information dynamics including the degree to which an initial movie-goer node's connectedness or each node's trust in its neighbors affect the success of a film, the identification of information tipping points or real world proxies for word of mouth, and the effect of the network structure on the overall distribution of revenue. This model can also be applied outside the film industry to study information dynamics in other areas such as music and book sales, website popularity, and voting. Finally, this dissertation provides further evidence that box office revenues cannot be predicted, and in the words of Goldman (1983) echoed by De Vany (2004), "nobody knows anything.".
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机译：每周，有50多部电影在剧院里放映，观众可以从中选择。对这些电影的相对票房成功率的分析表明，该电影是帕累托发行的，其中大约20％的电影获得了总收入的80％。亚瑟·德·瓦尼（Arthur De Vany）通过基于方程式的分析研究了这种“赢家通吃”分配的潜在原因，并得出理论认为，我们观察到的帕累托分配的票房收入来自电影观众微观层面的复杂适应行为，而这些行为并不完美信息。文献中充斥着解释大片电影如何发生的尝试，但显然没有人找到秘密的公式。几个人通过属性发出的信号或生成的信息推断出属性与票房成功之间的关系，但都遭受了无法将电影属性的影响与口碑相分离的困扰。基于电影的出勤模型，称为ChatterMod，其中具有异类和不完整信息的电影观众从没有“偏好”属性（例如评级，流派，明星的存在）的同质电影中进行选择，然后与他们交换电影信息邻居。 ChatterMod解释了票房收入偏向宏观水平的分配是如何产生的：a）电影观众的无标度网络具有不同的电影意识水平； b）每部电影相对于现有电影的收入； c）电影竞争-新电影中的信息引起了人们的注意，并且d）电影信息通过口耳相传渗透到整个网络中。在ChatterMod中，毫无疑问，信息与票房收入之间是否存在直接关系，因为模型中没有其他可影响这种关系的属性。当调整口碑和广告时，该模型产生与先前的经验研究相似的统计行为和直观行为。通过该模型，我为电影信息动力学的未来研究（包括初始电影观众节点的程度）提供了一个受控实验室。连通性或每个节点对邻居的信任会影响电影的成功，确定信息临界点或现实世界中口口相传的代理，以及网络结构对整体收入分配的影响。该模型也可以在电影业之外应用，以研究其他领域的信息动态，例如音乐和书籍销售，网站受欢迎程度和投票。最后，本文提供了进一步的证据，证明票房收入无法预测，用德·范尼（De Vany，2004）的高盛（Goldman，1983）的话来说，“没人知道。
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