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Videoland offers a comprehensive view of the \"tangible phase\" of consumer video, when Americans largely accessed movies as material commodities at video rental stores. Video stores served as a vital locus of movie culture from the early 1980s until the early 2000s, changing the way Americans socialized around movies and collectively made movies meaningful. When films became tangible as magnetic tapes and plastic discs, movie culture flowed out from the theater and the living room, entered the public retail space, and became conflated with shopping and salesmanship. In this process, video stores served as a crucial embodiment of movie culture's historical move toward increased flexibility, adaptability, and customization. In addition to charting the historical rise and fall of the rental industry, Herbert explores the architectural design of video stores, the social dynamics of retail encounters, the video distribution industry, the proliferation of video recommendation guides, and the often surprising persistence of the video store as an adaptable social space of consumer culture. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, cultural geography, and archival research, Videoland provides a wide-ranging exploration of the pivotal role video stores played in the history of motion pictures, and is a must-read for students and scholars of media history.

How will consumption patterns for popular and \"long-tail\" products change when consumers move from brick-and-mortar to Internet markets? We address this question using customer-level panel data obtained from a national video rental chain as it was closing many of its local stores. These data allow us to use the closure of a consumer's local video store as an instrument, breaking the inherent endogeneity between channel choice and product choice. Our results suggest that when consumers move from brick-and-mortar to online channels, they are significantly more likely to rent \"niche\" titles relative to \"blockbusters.\" This suggests that a significant amount of niche product consumption online is due to the direct influence of the channel on consumer behavior, not just due to selection effects from the types of consumers who decide to use the Internet channel or the types of products that consumers decide to purchase online. This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta, marketing.

Under a revenue-sharing contract, a retailer pays a supplier a wholesale price for each unit purchased, plus a percentage of the revenue the retailer generates. Such contracts have become more prevalent in the videocassette rental industry relative to the more conventional wholesale price contract. This paper studies revenue-sharing contracts in a general supply chain model with revenues determined by each retailer's purchase quantity and price. Demand can be deterministic or stochastic and revenue is generated either from rentals or outright sales. Our model includes the case of a supplier selling to a classical fixed-price newsvendor or a price-setting newsvendor. We demonstrate that revenue sharing coordinates a supply chain with a single retailer (i.e., the retailer chooses optimal price and quantity) and arbitrarily allocates the supply chain's profit. We compare revenue sharing to a number of other supply chain contracts (e.g., buy-back contracts, price-discount contracts, quantity-flexibility contracts, sales-rebate contracts, franchise contracts, and quantity discounts). We find that revenue sharing is equivalent to buybacks in the newsvendor case and equivalent to price discounts in the price-setting newsvendor case. Revenue sharing also coordinates a supply chain with retailers competing in quantities, e.g., Cournot competitors or competing newsvendors with fixed prices. Despite its numerous merits, we identify several limitations of revenue sharing to (at least partially) explain why it is not prevalent in all industries. In particular, we characterize cases in which revenue sharing provides only a small improvement over the administratively cheaper wholesale price contract. Additionally, revenue sharing does not coordinate a supply chain with demand that depends on costly retail effort. We develop a variation on revenue sharing for this setting.

Revenue sharing contracts, in which retailers pay a royalty on sales to their suppliers, are now widely used in the video rental industry. We show that revenue sharing is valuable in vertically separated industries in which demand is either stochastic (unpredictable) or variable (e.g., systematically declining), downstream inventory is chosen before demand is realized and downstream firms engage in intrabrand competition. Unlike two-part tariffs, revenue sharing achieves the first best outcome by softening retail price competition without distorting retailers' inventory decisions. Our theories are also consistent with trends in prices and availability following retailers' adoption of revenue sharing contracts.

A large body of theoretical work has explored the channels through which vertical contracts can induce efficiency improvements. However, it is also important to study vertical contracts empirically in order to gain insight into the relative size of different types of efficiency gains. In this paper, I empirically analyse a contractual innovation in the vertically separated video rental industry. Prior to 1998, video stores obtained inventory from movie distributors using simple linear-pricing contracts. In 1998, revenue-sharing contracts were widely adopted. I investigate the effect of the introduction of revenue-sharing contracts on firms' profits and consumer welfare. I analyse a new panel data set of home video retailers that includes information on individual retailers' contract and inventory choices, as well as rentals and contract terms for 246 movie titles and 6137 retailers in the U.S. during each week of 1998 and 1999 and the first half of 2000. A structural econometric model of firms' behaviour is developed that describes the nature of firms' contract choices. Estimates from this model indicate that both upstream and downstream profits increase by 10% under the revenue-sharing contract for popular titles. For less popular titles, the effects can be even larger. I also estimate that consumers benefit when revenue-sharing contracts are adopted.

Bundling is at the forefront of many policy debates as new technologies allow firms to implement more complex bundling arrangements. Realistic analyses of bundling—particularly between suppliers and retailers—require detailed data on both supply arrangements and consumer demand. We analyze firms' use of bundling as a vertical restraint (known as full-line forcing) using extensive supply and demand data from the video rental industry. Our model captures key details of the market that determine firms' contractual choices, and sheds light on the implications of these decisions. The empirical approach provides a model for how to analyze bundling when detailed data are available.

•We analyze the impact of price discounts on own- and cross-channel sales.•Our paper reports the results of a unique pricing experiment in an online marketplace.•Digital movie consumers are highly sensitive to price promotions.•Price promotions for digital movie sales do not seem to cannibalize digital rentals.•There seem to be a positive spillover across channels from price promotions. Technology is transforming the marketing function in many ways, and this transformation is particularly apparent for information goods such as movies where digital technologies provide marketers with new distribution channels, which in turn create new opportunities for cross-channel effects. However, these digital channels also provide researchers with new opportunities to measure micro-level customer behavior to understand the impact of cross-channel effects in real-world settings. In this paper, we study cross-channel effects between movies sold in digital purchase (commonly known as Electronic Sell Through or EST) and digital rental (commonly known as Video-On-Demand or VOD) markets. We do this using a unique sales dataset from a major digital movie retailer provided by a major movie studio. Our analysis takes advantage of a 14-week field experiment that allows us to measure the impact of price discounts on own- and cross-channel sales. We use this experiment to estimate own and cross price elasticities, whether price discounts cannibalize future sales, and most importantly whether price discounts in one channel affect sales for the same product in a presumably competing channel. Our analysis indicates that digital movie consumers are highly sensitive to price promotions. However, we also find that, contrary to expectations, price promotions in a digital sales channel for a movie do not seem to cannibalize digital rentals. Indeed, our results suggest that, if anything, price promotions for digital movie sales can increase digital rentals. We explore a variety of explanations for this counterintuitive result, including the possibility that the ease of information transmission online through third-party websites, blogs, and online discussion areas may create information spillovers such that price discounts in one channel may increase product awareness in other competing sales channels. From a managerial perspective, our results suggest that cross-channel cannibalization can be reduced or even reversed in the presence of information spillovers, and that there are many new opportunities for marketers to directly measure these cross-channel effects using experimental data from online platforms.

In 2016, Detroit, Michigan’s police department piloted a city-wide public-private-community video surveillance program called Project Green Light (PGL). Businesses that host the service, typically gas stations and convenience stores, receive priority response times for emergency dispatch calls, artificially decreasing 911 response times in a city with historically low emergency response capacity. This has led to many senior care homes with medically vulnerable residents to subscribe to PGL, as well as landlords of residential apartment buildings. While the program has been identified as a marker of gentrification by housing and anti-surveillance activists and residents, it has also raised concern about perpetuating the criminalization of Black Detroiters, specifically those living in rental housing that hosts the technology. In a city that is rapidly evolving through private, institutional, and public partnership developments while elected officials espouse to maintain racial and economic equity as core values of Detroit’s upcoming master planning process, the lack of foresight of the impact of surveillance tech is striking. The article’s focus is on surveillance technology as a defining element of contemporary urban development which enacts both a forbearance and expansion of rights through the application of technology to property relations. Relying on the automation of policing and racially biased artificial intelligence perpetuates criminality based on race, class, and perceived gender while additionally tying those experiences to the bundle of rights associated with the ownership of property.

We report on a field study demonstrating systematic differences between the preferences people anticipate they will have over a series of options in the future and their subsequent revealed preferences over those options. Using a novel panel data set, we analyze the film rental and return patterns of a sample of online DVD rental customers over a period of four months. We predict and find that should DVDs (e.g., documentaries) are held significantly longer than want DVDs (e.g., action films) within customer. Similarly, we also predict and find that people are more likely to rent DVDs in one order and return them in the reverse order when should DVDs are rented before want DVDs. Specifically, a 1.3% increase in the probability of a reversal in preferences (from a baseline rate of 12%) ensues if the first of two sequentially rented movies has more should and fewer want characteristics than the second film. Finally, we find that as the same customers gain more experience with online DVD rentals, the extent to which they hold should films longer than want films decreases. Our results suggest that present bias has a meaningful impact on choice in the field, and that people may learn about their present bias with experience and, as a result, gain the capacity to curb its influence.

Recent developments in video rental supply chains seem to indicate that revenue sharing contracts are beneficial to all parties involved in the industry. This paper illustrates a theoretical underpinning of the observed practice. A video rental supply chain is modelled to study pricing and replenishment decision making by the two autonomous firms in the chain, namely a movie studio producing the tapes and a video rental shop renting the tapes to customers. In the model the movie studio is to set the price for selling the tapes to the video rental store and the video rental shop must decide the number of copies of the new movie videotape it should purchase. The paper illustrates that revenue sharing contract can optimize the chain and bring win-win situations to the players in the industry.