How Video Rental Patterns Change as Consumers Move Online
34 Pages Posted: 23 Jan 2012 Last revised: 20 Aug 2014
Date Written: October 10, 2012
Abstract
How will consumption patterns change when consumers move from brick-and-mortar to Internet markets? If consumers purchase more niche products online than at brick-and- mortar stores, does this have something to do with the channel or is this solely due to selection effects: the types of consumers who decide to use the Internet channel or the types of products that consumers select to purchase online?
We address these questions using customer-level rental panel data obtained from a national video chain as it was closing many of its local stores. This allows us to observe how behavior changes when consumers are forced to move from brick-and-mortar to online consumption.
Our results suggest that when consumers move from brick-and-mortar to online channels they are significantly more likely to rent “niche” titles relative to “blockbusters.” This suggests that a significant amount of niche product consumption online is due to the nature of the channel, not just due to selection effects.
Keywords: Long Tail, movie rentals, natural experiment, empirical estimation
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
From Niches to Riches: Anatomy of the Long Tail
By Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu Jeffrey Hu, ...
-
By Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu Jeffrey Hu, ...
-
Blockbuster Culture's Next Rise or Fall: The Impact of Recommender Systems on Sales Diversity
By Daniel M. Fleder and Kartik Hosanagar
-
How Does Popularity Information Affect Choices? A Field Experiment
-
Global Village or Cyberbalkans: Modeling and Measuring the Integration of Electronic Communities
-
Recommendation Networks and the Long Tail of Electronic Commerce
-
Electronic Companion: How Does Popularity Information Affect Choices? A Field Experiment
-
Designing Sales Contests: Does the Prize Structure Matter?
By Noah Lim, Michael Ahearne, ...
-
The State of Network Organization: A Survey in Three Frameworks
-
The Gestalt in Graphs: Prediction Using Economic Networks
By Vasant Dhar, Gal Oestreicher-singer, ...