Professor Thorsten Hennig-Thurau is part of a team of scientists that determines what a movie star actually contributes to the success of a film -- and it is his Oscars or commercial success that producers should pay attention to.

Like so many of us, Professor Thorsten Hennig-Thurau and his collaborators in this research project, Professor Julian Hofmann from Ecole de Management de Normandie (France), Professor Franziska Völckner (University of Cologne), and Professor Michel Clement (University of Hamburg) have been intrigued by the role that stars play in the entertainment industry, and particularly their economic contributions to movies. Here, they summarize what is known about the value of stars by conducting a meta-analysis, but also explore an extensive data set of 1500+ films to isolate the stars' contribution to films' success, while accounting for endogeneous selection biases. Their findings reveal a number of empirical generalizations, including the size of the average revenue contributions by commercially, but also artistically successful movie stars and their respective box office elasticities. The complete article is now available at sciencedirect.