TIME CONSISTENCY AND SELLER COMMITMENT IN INTERTEMPORAL MOVIE DISTRIBUTION: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF THE VIDEO WINDOW <link rid="fn1">-super-* </link>

We study the determinants of the 'video window' (the interval between a movie's theatrical and video releases), based on a sample of 1,157 films released on video between 1988 and 1997. For subsets of films having shorter theater run lengths (1 to 17 weeks), windows were generally longer than, and largely invariant to, measures of the time required to exhaust the theater market. One interpretation of our results is that U.S. movie distributors resolved a time consistency problem by coordinating their behavior to maintain longer windows than would have otherwise resulted, but different explanations are also plausible. Copyright 2010 The Authors. The Journal of Industrial Economics 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. and the Editorial Board of The Journal of Industrial Economics.