Analytical Solutions for an Intuition-Driven Industry: the Case of the Movies

Interviene: Berend Wierenga, Rotterdam School of Management Erasmus University

Organizzato da: Dipartimento di Marketing

Abstract: The movie industry is characterized by experiential products, an artistic tradition and a dominance of conventional wisdom, rules of thumb, and “Fingerspitzengefühl”. This makes the industry intuition-driven. At the same time, the industry has to deal with a lot of analytical issues, for example, forecasting the numbers of visitors, ordering decisions of movies, and the scheduling of movies in time and in screening rooms. Furthermore, the industry is very rich on data. So, there is ample opportunity for offering decision support in the form of analytical systems that can complement the primarily intuition-driven decision making of the managers. In this presentation we will discuss, how we developed analytical models for several problems in the movie industry, and how this was done in the setting of  the real-life business environment. During the presentation, most of the attention will be devoted to SilverScheduler, a model that generates weekly movie schedules in a multiplex movie theater. We will pay attention to the model itself, consisting of a  forecasting and a scheduling module, and also to the implementation strategy. The forecasting model is estimated by means of regression, the scheduling module uses state-of-the-art column generation techniques.