Harold & Kumar or Citizen Kane?

Any longtime Netflix subscriber is familiar with this quiet disease:

You rent a couple of movies, one that you know you should watch because it's been deemed a classic by the intelligentsia (e.g. Citizen Kane, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, or for some reason that escapes me The Decalogue) and one that you want to watch because you're pretty sure you'll have a good time (e.g. Superbad or H&K - the sequel is coming out in April!). Invariably, the latter is watched the day you get it and back in the mail the next day, while the brain food stays in the envelope until you slowly come to the realization that you'll never watch it and on a quiet Sunday morning open the package, tear off the perforated sheet, reseal it and put it in the mail the next day.

Well, thanks to the power of research, we now have some proof that the phenomenon is widespread, at least in Australia. Using data acquired from Quickflix, a rental company similar to Netflix but based in the land of Kangaroos, Katherine Milkman, Todd Rogers, and Max Bazerman of the Harvard Business School analyzed the rental habits of the site's users over a four-month period.

Based on two surveys (one where paid participants were asked to rate different genres on a "should watch" to "want to watch" scale and another where participants were asked to rate different movies on that same scale), the researchers gave each one of Quickflix's 15,000 movies a "should watch" vs. "want to watch" rating. The highest ranked should-watch genre was documentary and the highest ranked should-watch movie was Kokoda Frontline, an Australian, Oscar-winning documentary from 1942 about the Kodoka campaign in Papua New Guinea during World War II. The highest ranked want-to-watch genre was Action with The Story of Ricky, a violent, futuristic, sci-fi horror film from 1988 based on an anime series, being the highest ranked want-to-watch movie.

They find that even when users thought they would want to watch a high-brow movie before a low-brow one (by having the high-brow one mailed to their home first), there was a good chance that the low-brow movie would be returned first. (The researchers estimated that this probability was between 10 to 30 percent greater than in other situations, but argue that because of limitations in their data collection, it's likely to be much higher.)

They also found that high-brow movies were held for two days longer than low-brow movies. I call B.S. on that last, I usually hold mine for two months longer.

(And I also wonder if the late fees people pay at Blockbuster -- or other rental businesses -- are more concentrated in the "should" category of goods as opposed to the "want" category.)

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