Niche Overlap and Individual Antagonism: An Empirical Analysis of Informing in Hollywood

Abstract

This study examines informing on others as an antagonistic act between individual agents in a labor market. We conduct an empirical analysis of artists called to testify during the 1950s Congressional hearings into Communism in Hollywood, and multi-level regression models reveal that the odds of an artist informing on another increase when their career histories are more similar. The similarity reflects levels of niche overlap in the labor market. The finding that similarity contributes to antagonism in the context of resource competition is consistent with a known social comparison process, whereby uncertainty about performance leads more similar people to attend to and exclude one another to a greater extent.

Keywords: niche overlap, resource similarity, informing, blacklisting, Hollywood, film industry

JEL Classification: M10