Two Information Aggregation Mechanisms for Predicting the Opening Weekend Box Office Revenues of Films: Boxoffice Prophecy and Guess of Guesses

摘要

Successful field tests were conducted on two new Information Aggregation Mechanisms (IAMs). The mechanisms collected information held as intuitions about opening weekend box office revenues for movies in Australia. Participants were film school students. One mechanism is similar to parimutuel betting that produces a probability distribution over box office amounts. Except for “art house films”, the predicted distribution is indistinguishable from the actual revenues. The second mechanism is based on guesses of the guesses of others and applied when incentives for accuracy could not be used. It tested well against data and contains information not encompassed by the first mechanism.