Title:      Scaling the Critics: Uncovering the Latent Dimensions
of Movie Criticism with An Item Response Approach

Authors:    Michael Peress, Arthur Spirling

Entrydate:  2008-07-04 11:22:51

Keywords:   threshold utility model, film, ideal points

Abstract:   We study the critical opinions of expert movie
reviewers as an item response problem. We develop a framework
that models an individual's decision to approve or disapprove of
an item.  Using this framework, we are able to recover the
locations of movies and ideal points of critics in the same
multi-dimensional space. We demonstrate that a three dimensional
model captures much of the variation in critical opinions. The
first dimension signifies movie 'quality' while the other two
connote the nature and subject matter of the films. We then
demonstrate that the dimensions uncovered from our 'threshold
utility model' are statistically significant predictors of a
movie's success, and are particularly useful in predicting the
success of `independent' films.

http://polmeth.wustl.edu/retrieve.php?id=778

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