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Innovation management seminar: Crowding, Satiation and Saturation: A Product Demography of Television Series

29.10.2013 | Institutsekretær Merete Elmann

Dato fre 08 nov
Tid 10:30 12:00
Sted Room 1325-242, Dept. of Business Administration

Friday 8 November at 10:30-12:00 in Room 1325-242, Associate Professor Marco S. Giarratana from the Department of Management and Technology at Bocconi University, will give a seminar entitled:

\'Crowding, Satiation and Saturation: A Product Demography of Television Series\'


Marco S. Giarratana
is associate professor at the Department of Management and Technology atBocconi University. He holds a PhD in Economics and Management from the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa and a Licentiate degree in Economics from the Bocconi University of Milan. Marco has published several articles on i) knowledge spillovers & geography; ii) technology, product & marketing strategy. He is associate editor of European Management Review. He was an Elected Reps-at-Large for the TIM Division of the Academy of Management for the period 2010-2012. He is now serving as member of the research committee at the BPS Division of the Academy of Management.

Abstract: We explored the product demography of a cultural product, television programming, using complete data on the population of television series introduced in the United States from 1946 to 2003. Relative to other settings in which product demography has been studied, television series differ much more on difficult-to-compare features (non-alignable rather than alignable attributes), a fact that may influence both perceptions of novelty and of substitutability. We propose two demographic processes – satiation and saturation – that could emerge from these perceptual effects. To explore these ideas, we estimated the effects of product age, across- and within-firm crowding, and product theme saturation on the longevity of series. We found evidence of both satiation and saturation: Both series age and prior cumulative entries in the same conceptual theme – even offerings no longer being produced – reduced survival rates. Later entrants in a theme also generated less intense competition. Crowding, meanwhile, had similar effects to those found in past studies of product demography.

Tags: seminar