The Crooked Timber Blog Discusses Netflix

Professor Henry Farrell on the very popular blog CrookedTimber.org wrote a couple of interesting bits about the psychology behind Netflix.

His first post talks about why we sometimes keep movies, unwatched, for months:

Movies that we’ve rented sometimes sit there for two or three months before we watch them, or eventually, reluctantly, decide to send them back without seeing them. To my shame, this happens most often with the interesting, difficult films with sub-titles. I suspect that this is because we’re accustomed to thinking of DVDs as stocks rather than flows. Because we have physical possession of the DVD, we’re disinclined to give it back until we’ve actually watched it.

Henry's second post includes an e-mail from Hunt Stilwell that takes this discussion to a deeper level. Hunt references research into movie viewing (click here to view the research paper), which breaks most movies into either a "vice" or "virtue" film:

In fact, I think our experience does a pretty good job of replicating an experiment by George Lowenstein and colleagues on intertemporal decision making. In that experiment (a link to the paper is below), participants were allowed to choose films, some of which were “vice” films (e.g., “Armageddon” or “The Mask”), with others being “virtue” films (e.g., “Schindler’s List” or one of your foriegn films with subtitles). Participants made the choices either in a sequence, meaning that the viewings would be in the immediate future, or made them all simultaneously, meaning that some of the viewings would be delayed. Participants who made the choices in a sequence tended to pick mostly vice films, while participants who made the choices simultaneously picked many more virtue films.

He goes on to explain that me might just be participating in a huge experiment:

I’ve always had a problem with the “virtue/vice” distinction applied to films in the Lowenstein paper, because there really isn’t much of a difference between the cost associated with the two types of films. I suppose the wasted time makes for a cost difference, but I’m not sure that’s enough. However, the pattern is the same. The fact that Netflix demonstrates this so well, and even replicates an actual experiment, lends me to believe that Netflix is really just a big social psychology experiment, and those of us who’ve subscribed are all unwitting participants.

Heheh. I can't believe someone put that much effort into a research paper on the psychology behind deciding to watch a serious, artsy movie vs. a mindless action flick. :-)
 
Thanks to Lisa (Cadence90.com) for sharing this story. 

Comments

[Ken]

I just heard that DVDBarn.com is opening up 30 more warehouses nationwide on Monday the 20th of Sept. Looks like they got some bigtime funding and are going head-to-head with Netflix. They also sent me an email with a promotion code that is supposed to give me a 3 out at a time plan for only $12.95 per month and apparently it is not just a promotional deal. They say if I signup I'll get grandfathered at that rate.

The code for that plan is dvd-4me if anybody wants it

Ken

This site has a pretty good summary and comparison of Netflick's http://www.yourfreepasses.com/netflick%27s.html service vs Blockbuster etc., if you're interested this should help you make your decision.