A shacklean approach to the demand for movies

In forming their expectations, consumers interpret information signals made available by a film's producers/distributors. These signals are likely to consist of markers such as actor or (less frequent) director as star, and genre-type, each of which, and in combination, becomes a factor within a consumer's mental framework of evaluation, which in turn is a substructure within that person's world-and-life-view (weltanschaunng) (Albert, 2005). It can be conjectured that consumers are likely to be attracted by signals that are consonant with the experiences that have formed their current tastes, and deterred or repelled by signals that are dissonant (Gilad, Kaish, & Loab, 1987). However, a consumer's worldview is not an immutable monolith; although certain core components may change very little in a lifetime not beset with traumatic disruption, it is fundamentally a dynamic system that can be affected, exogenously, by political and economic circumstances (among which, employment, taxes, prices and incomes have immediate relevance to levels and patterns of consumption), technological innovation, the availability of leisure, and changing fashions in aesthetics and ideas, and, endogenously, by the ability of the consumer to learn through the consumption experience and be changed by it, perhaps imperceptibly in the short run, but noticeably over time. In this way, what may be dissonant information for a consumer today may prove to be more compatible with that person's tastes in, say, 10 years time. Taste formation and hence expectations, thus involve both exogenous and endogenous aspects of change (Earl & Potts, 2004).