Modelling movie attendance with seasonality: evidence from China

ABSTRACT

High-frequency data improves the timeliness of movie attendance forecasts, but also results in the issue of seasonality. The main objective of this article is to build and test a novel movie attendance model that considers seasonality. Based on the Bass model, we combine an intertemporal demand shift pattern and the binary elements of seasonality – weekends and holidays – and propose a model called DISBM. We chose a sample of 58 movies released in China in 2013 to evaluate our proposal. The empirical results suggest that DISBM has better performance than other seasonal models. We demonstrate that the intertemporal demand shift results in weekend fluctuations, while the extra demand causes the seasonal holiday effect. The intent of this study is to better understand various movie attendance diffusions given different seasonal effects, in order to develop corresponding marketing strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Seasonality
• movie attendance
• product diffusion
• weekend effect
• holiday effect

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• M21
• C51

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Major Project of National Social Science Fund of China (Art Class) under Grant No. 16ZD04 and by the Innovation Method Project of Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China under Grant No. 2015IM030100.