Are motion picture audiences influenced by box office reports? Do they `herd' after the leaders and ignore possibly better but less popular films? How important is a big opening to the revenue a film eventually earns? This paper develops a dynamical learning model of motion picture demand that...

Piracy is one of the most challenging problems faced by the motion picture industry. The Motion Picture Association of America estimates that US studios lose more than $3 billion annually in box office revenue from piracy. They have launched a major effort to prevent these losses. Yet their...

The blockbuster strategy---using big budgets, stars, and advertising to create high opening week box office grosses---is based on the theory that motion picture audiences follow an information cascade by choosing movies according to how heavily they are advertised, what stars are in them, and...

This is a study of emergent economic order---order that is the result of human action but not human design. I study a coordination game in which locally connected agents act without deliberation. Their locally optimal actions propagate through neighbors to others, and coalitions form adaptively....

An economic organization represents order and information. I define an economic organization to be a coalition of consistent multilateral contracts and develop measures of its complexity. I show that when a new organization is formed, information is created. I find there are information...

Audiences discover what movies they like and spread the word. Information feedback produces Bose-Einstein dynamics in the motion picture box office revenue distribution. Information cascades generate box office `hits' (superstars) and `flops' (antistars). The revenue distribution evolves...

Audiences discover what movies they like and spread the word. Information feedback produces Bose-Einstein dynamics in the motion picture box office revenue distribution. Information cascades generate box office `hits' (superstars) and `flops' (antistars). The revenue distribution evolves...

An economic organization represents order and information. I define an economic organization to be a coalition of consistent multilateral contracts and develop measures of its complexity. I show that when a new organization is formed, information is created. I find there are information...