Do movie majors really collude?Indirect evidence from release schedules

Resumen

Major Hollywood motion picture studios have a dominant market share in the main international movie markets, but their competitive behavior has come under suspicion. In 2006, the Spanish Competition Court fined these Major Distributors for anticompetitive practices. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the presence (or absence) of collusive behavior among the Major Distributors during the 2002-2009 period. Because the release date of a movie is a critical variable of competition, we test whether Major Distributors are coordinating their release schedules by employing a reduced-type model in which the distance between a pair of films that are released in the same "theater demand window" is regressed on a set of variables that are likely to affect distributors release schedules. In general, our results suggest that Major Distributors achieve a larger degree of coordination in their release schedules than other distributors in the Spanish motion picture market.