Esports has emerged as a major sector of the global entertainment industry, with prize structures designed by tournament organisers and game publishers that concentrate rewards on a small elite. We analyse career duration and prize earnings using a 1999–2024 player-year panel of 846 elite players from 62 countries, drawn from publicly available tournament records. Career duration is modelled using parametric accelerated failure-time and truncated negative binomial specifications; annual prize earnings are modelled in logarithms using fixed-effects panel regressions on age bands, format, region, and period. Three findings stand out. First, exit hazards are highest in the early years of a career and decline among survivors, with longer careers for players who enter the elite circuit younger. Second, prize earnings are highly concentrated, with Gini coefficients above 0.7 across the panel and rising in the upper tail. Third, real prize earnings have grown rapidly in team formats and have been broadly stagnant in individual formats, consistent with publishers using prize-pool escalation as a primary lever for sustaining effort and competitive intensity in flagship team titles. We interpret these patterns through the lens of rank-order tournament theory (Lazear and Rosen, 1981; Rosen, 1986), which provides a natural framework for understanding how top-heavy prize design shapes selection, retention, and the distribution of earnings in elite esports careers.
Films are risky investments financed under uncertainty, and studios increasingly depend on international markets, which now account for more than two-thirds of worldwide theatrical gross. In such an environment, economic downturns and tighter credit conditions may make firms more conservative in project selection, favoring attributes associated with more certain expected returns. Using computational screentime data from 2,023 top domestic-grossing U.S. films released between 1980 and 2022, linked to box-office financials and macroeconomic indicators, this paper asks whether macroeconomic conditions predict Black actor representation in Hollywood film. Black screentime share is lower when credit spreads widen and higher when GDP grows, and films with Black representation above 20
Despite the high degree of homogeneity and extremely low marginal and distribution costs of digital products, significant international price differences exist. This paper explains this phenomenon from the perspective of copyright protection. Using unique data from the global digital game platform Steam, we find that stronger regional copyright protection significantly increases digital game prices in those regions. This effect is especially pronounced for games released by large publishers, those that display explicit copyright notices, and newly launched titles. Further analysis reveals that these price increases are primarily driven by a reduction in unauthorized substitutes, through both lower supply-side imitation and weaker demand-side piracy. In addition, we investigate how copyright protection impacts firms’ dynamic pricing behaviors. Our findings show that stronger copyright protection reduces the reliance on promotions, regular price adjustments, and extreme low-price strategies as competitive tools, leading to a more stable pricing environment. This paper provides valuable insights into the factors influencing cross-border transactions of digital products, data, and assets, and highlights the critical role of copyright protection in shaping international market segmentation.
This essay discusses a conception of cultural capital based on profiles of cultural identity with a territorial focus. It proposes an operational method for constructing a composite index that represents the stock of cultural capital, regardless of the derived flow of goods and services and, therefore, of the size of the commercial cultural sector. The synthetic cultural capital index aims to be comprehensive in its composition and exhaustive in its territorial coverage, so that it can be readily applied in other empirical studies that seek to measure the economic impact of cultural capital, its contribution to development, and its relationships with other economic variables. It also seeks to analyse patterns of geographical distribution and spatial disparities.
This paper investigates the determinants of attendance to theatre in Türkiye. Cultural goods are experience goods and their present consumption is likely to increase future consumption. A rational response of a future price change for an addictive good such as theatre can also affect the current consumption. This paper investigates whether aggregate theatre attendance can show rationally addicted behaviour for the Turkish theatre sector. Since the beginning of the modern Turkish Republic, theatre, as a western art form, has been considered one of the most important cultural goods and services. Today, in many smaller provinces in the country, theatre is provided almost exclusively by a public entity founded specifically for this purpose. In this paper, we test the rational addiction hypothesis for the Turkish theatregoer and we also evaluate the rational addiction hypothesis within a broader framework. We use system GMM to estimate the model and evaluate the rational addiction model more comprehensively than is commonplace in the literature. We employ a panel data of 81 main provinces with 16 years (2007-2022) and find that the rational addiction hypothesis is validated by data on theatre attendance in Türkiye. Other determinants of theatre attendance include price, the price of cinema, and theatregoers’ level of income and education. The number of plays by foreign playwrights, a variable that captures the quality of the production, is found to increase theatre attendance. The presence of other cultural or entertainment opportunities increases theatre attendance in Türkiye. Interestingly, in Türkiye, the presence of other cultural or entertainment opportunities also increases theatre attendance i.e., rather than competing, cultural activities enhance a province’s cultural scene and increase theatre attendance. We also apply our proposed comprehensive evaluation methodology to other studies in the cultural economics literature as well as to a sample that includes the seminal empirical applications of the rational addiction model on cigarettes and alcohol. We show that the rational addiction model fares much better empirically for beneficially addictive cultural goods than for harmful addictive goods.
Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we estimate how having children affects parents’ participation in arts, high- and lowbrow cultural activities, and sports. Identification combines three complementary, well-established strategies: (i) an event-study design around first births; (ii) twin births as exogenous shocks to second and third births; and (iii) sex-composition preferences as an exogenous driver of third births. Following first births, average participation falls by 13–54
Jury voting is a widespread practice in various fields, such as cultural events. While existing literature typically examines decision-making rules, our analysis centers on how the grading behaviors of jury members impact the results. We analyze historical data from the Queen Elisabeth International Competition, which includes cello, piano, violin, and voice categories. The competition consists of three rounds in which candidates perform recitals. Each round culminates in the selection of a subset of candidates. Our findings indicate that judges who demonstrate greater variability in their scoring behaviors exert a more significant influence on the final rankings.
This study investigates the impact of the Creatives Rebuild New York (CRNY) Guaranteed Income for Artists (GIA) program on labor supply and earnings among New York State artists. The program provided 2400 artists with 1000 monthly, unconditional payments for 18 months to address financial instability and promote artistic practices. Using a matched comparison of participant and control group data, the analysis reveals that guaranteed income increased time spent on arts work by 3.9 h weekly while reducing non-arts work by 2.4 h. Although participation in arts-work grew, earnings from both arts and non-arts sectors declined, indicating a shift in financial reliance enabled by guaranteed income. The findings help validate Throsby (1994) work-preference model, emphasizing the intrinsic value of artistic labor over monetary incentives, especially nonlabor income.
This introduction presents the contributions to the special issue on the theoretical foundations of cultural economics. It discusses the role of theory in the field, emphasizing the limited presence of theoretical work in recent issues of the Journal of Cultural Economics, then situates the five papers within the broader literature. We describe how the selected papers build on and adapt existing economic frameworks to capture distinctive features of cultural markets—including market selection, preference formation, and the organization of production—and conclude by outlining directions for future theoretical research and the importance of theory for advancing cultural economics.
This study empirically examines whether public subsidies increase the originality of programming decisions of 40 Italian opera and drama theatres from the 2015–16 to the 2022–23 season, exploiting a newly assembled panel dataset. It innovates on the literature as it (1) provides the first panel data analysis of the relationship, allowing to examine the originality of programming choices also over time; (2) calculates the conventionality indexes separately by genre (opera and drama), author and title; (3) deals with Italian theatres. The estimates with theatre fixed effects show that a higher share of subsidies in total revenues of opera theatres are associated with greater originality in the choice of authors but not of titles; for drama theatres, subsidies do not promote greater originality. Across genres, the capacity of the venue is positively correlated with conventionality, while the education of the potential audience allows for more original programming choices. A battery of robustness tests confirms these results.
This paper proposes an economic account of literary and dramatic creation, and bridges the gap between quantitative models of literary works and game theory applications in the humanities, by focusing on outcomes in drama as devices for writers to produce works of optimal interest to their audience. Relying on psychological game theory we can represent the tension between the emotion of surprise and convention in literary work, and obtain certain theoretical optimal patterns. The model predicts that optimal storytelling leads to a departure from realism and convention, as a function of preferences for creativity. Across multiple scenes, authors optimally allocate narrative importance to manage the audience’s emotional payoff. We illustrate the framework using a dataset of decisions in a corpus of ancient Greek tragedies.
Why do creators sometimes act as firms, internalizing the realization of their work, while in other settings they delegate realization to market intermediaries or operate under hierarchical employment? We develop an analytical framework in which creators choose how to organize realization when contracts are imperfectly enforceable and limits on contractual payments constrain transfers to creators. Delegation can reduce coordination burdens by shifting realization to established intermediaries, but may fail to meet creators’ participation constraints, making self-integration an endogenous response to contracting limitations. The framework highlights how organizational choice depends not only on coordination costs, but also on the feasibility of contractual transfer and the timing of diffusion. We illustrate the model using the history of Western classical music, where composition and realization are technologically distinct yet jointly required for value creation, yielding a transparent make-or-buy setting. The framework is consistent with the historical evolution from salaried employment under patronage, to entrepreneurial self-organization as markets expanded under weak copyright, and ultimately to delegation under mature intermediation and contracting. It also clarifies why composers sometimes sequenced dissemination—using performance before publication—when the timing of diffusion could not be governed through contract. Similar trade-offs shape creator-intermediary relationships in contemporary creative markets.
We develop a dynamic model of how engagement-driven curation, such as Spotify’s algorithmic curation of playlists or Netflix’s personalized menus of TV shows, shapes the evolution of aesthetic tastes. Building on the canonical consumption capital model of Becker et al. (1988), we introduce two innovations: non-monotonic returns to familiarity, where moderate exposure to a style enhances appreciation but excessive exposure causes boredom; and curator-controlled exposure, where engagement-maximizing intermediaries determine which content consumers encounter. We show that when curators treat consumers’ familiarity as exogenous, failing to recognize it as shaped by their own past promotional choices, they can become trapped in inefficient equilibria with self-confirming beliefs, even though they may have high predictive accuracy for any given recommendation. Second, even when curators track familiarity as an endogenous state variable, they structurally underexplore when their evaluation horizons are short relative to long-run taste evolution timescales. We derive welfare implications, characterize comparative statics, and show that in both cases, lower prediction accuracy in curation can be welfare-improving.
Throsby’s work on the performing arts applied the natural monopoly model to the analysis of subsidy. The model has long been used as the basis for regulating network based industries and now is part of economic analysis of digitisation in the creative industries. Platform economics demonstrates the complexity of interacting forces in digital online production and consumption, raising new problems for regulators and for cultural policy.
Cultural economics can provide a stronger rationale for government support of the arts. An economic justification for public funding for cultural institutions typically invokes positive externalities, yet the empirical base for cultural spillovers remains weak. We outline the challenges in quantifying social returns to cultural participation and propose a framework and an empirical research agenda to improve the policy relevance of cultural economics. We develop recent theoretical work on the concept of cultural human-capital externalities—benefits to third parties that arise through audiences’ accumulation of cultural human- capital. Unlike heritage‑oriented public-goods values attached to the mere existence of cultural assets, these spillovers scale with participation and challenge prevailing valuation techniques. We critically review contingent valuation as a tool for generating evidence on the democratization of culture and related cultural human-capital externalities, and show the challenges stated-preference surveys face in providing policy-relevant evidence because the scenarios embed unidentified causal pathways or lack policy consequentiality. Policy-relevant evidence needs a methodology that leverages natural experiments to obtain unbiased treatment effects of cultural attendance on measurable outcomes (e.g., crime, prosocial behavior) and connects that to incentive-compatible valuation techniques to measure the economic value of these externalities. The conclusion identifies trends that elevate the urgency for this research agenda in policy-relevant economic evidence. Like David Throsby’s many contributions, this approach can help bridge cultural economics and public policy.
The effects of age or career experience on productivity, as measured by the creative quality of the work, for workers in creative fields, has been of some interest to researchers in a number of areas, including economics. Decades of research find that for a great variety of such fields, peak age is typically in the 30s, but may vary according to field, or generation within a field. For example, studies of generations of painters during transitions from periods emphasizing craftsmanship to ones of avant-garde originality have found creativity profiles whose peaks are earlier for later generations. The question of peak ages for golf course architects relative to other fields, as well as generational change, may be interesting for a few reasons. Firstly, the craft-oriented nature of the field, along with the importance of reputation and track record in securing top commissions (analogous to building architecture) suggests that peaks may be relatively late in life. Second, for reasons similar to those in painting, the possibility of generational shift in lifetime creativity profiles exists due to evolution in career dynamics and standards of judgment that have occurred in the field of golf course architecture. We evaluate these hypotheses with two novel data sets and corresponding econometric methodologies: (i) numerical rankings of golf course quality obtained from a popular guide to international golf courses, for courses designed by a set of major golf course architects with birth dates covering a range of over 150 years, and (ii) magazine rankings of the top 100 golf courses in the United States. With both data sets, we estimate how architects’ productivities (measured by the quality of golf courses designed) relate to age and experience polynomials. We find that golf architects peak quite late in life, with little evidence of intergenerational shifts in creativity profiles.
This study proposes a novel methodological framework that integrates extreme value theory and hedonic regression models to analyse the price formation in fine art auctions. Hammer prices reflect extreme upper-tail realizations of the distribution of bidders’ reservation prices, and standard hedonic approaches centred on average outcomes are not well-suited to capture this crucial feature of the pricing process. In the paper, hammer prices are modelled explicitly as upper-tail observations using a Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) specification embedded within an otherwise standard hedonic framework. Using a sample of Picasso paintings sold at auction between 2000 and 2024, the analysis constructs and compares hedonic price indices based on OLS, median regression, and GEV. The analysis shows that explicitly accounting for tail behaviour results in more stable and informative measures of price dynamics. Bridging the gap between the traditional hedonic approaches and the actual auction pricing mechanisms, this paper aims to provide an integrated framework for constructing art price indices in thin and volatile markets.
The cultural sector plays a significant role in economic and social development, contributing to approximately 3
