Impact of user-generated and professional critics reviews on Bollywood movie success

•We examine the impact of both user-generated and professional reviews of movies on their box office performance.•We find that both volume and valence of user generated reviews have significant positive association with box-office revenue.•Valence shows a saturation effect such that positivity effect shows decreasing returns at high positivity levels.•We also find that expert reviews positively affect box office revenue with little evidence of any curvilinear effects.

User generated (e.g., peer-to-peer or word-of-mouth) reviews and professional experts' reviews are important sources of external information that consumers use in making consumption decisions, but studies of their simultaneous effects is scarce. We develop a conceptual model for hypothesizing the simultaneous effects of the volume and valence of user and expert reviews on sales (i.e., box-office) revenue in the consumption of entertainment products (i.e., movies). We gather and analyze the User Generated Reviews (UGRs) using a text processing algorithm and evaluate resulting semantic networks to validate our approach. Combining these data with other relevant data from multiple sources for all Bollywood movies released over a six month period, we test the hypotheses proposed in the model. We find that, after controlling for effect of expert reviews, both volume and valence of user generated reviews have significant positive association with box-office revenue; however, valence evidences a curvilinear (saturation) effect such that positivity effect shows decreasing returns at high positivity levels. We also find that expert reviews positively affect box office revenue with little evidence of saturation or amplifying effects.

Chinese abstract用户创作的（如同行彼此之间或口口相传）的评论和专家的评语是外部信息的重要来源，消费者可以在作出消费决定时对这些信息来源加以利用，但是鲜有对它们之间的协同效应的研究。我们开发了一个概念模型，以假设用户评价和专家评论对娱乐产品（如电影）的销售（即票房）收入的同步效应。我们使用文本处理算法收集和分析了用户创作的评论（UGRs），并对由此产生的语义网络进行评估，从而验证我们的方法。将这些数据与从多种来源取得的、在6个月内发布的所有与宝莱坞电影有关的其他数据结合起来，我们对模型中提出的假设进行了测试。我们发现，在控制了专家评语的效果之后，用户创作的评论无论是在数量上还是在价值上都与票房收入有显著的正相关性；然而，价值方面的证据显示了一个曲线（饱和度）的效果，即这样的积极效果在正相关性水平较高时会呈现一个下降的回报率我们还发现，专家评语会积极地影响票房收入，几乎不存在饱和度和放大效应的证据。评出了前100个营销系。