Hedonics, Anime, and Database Consumption Theory

Hedonic theory in economics says that some many goods are bundles of attributes. A house is not just a house, it comprises floorspace, bathrooms, access to jobs, school access, noise externalities, lot size, view, parking, and so on. Price reflects the bundle (Rosen 1974). This is not limited to housing, though it is perhaps the most familiar context, and the one I have used.

In media, film economists have for years treated movies as bundles of attributes, stars, director, budget, genre, sequel status, studio backing, release timing, reviews, and so on, to explain box office or profitability. The movie is treated as a package (McKenzie 2023).

I have long thought this would make an excellent card-based game, Movie Mogul, where players draw famous actors and actresses, scripts, directors, and play them in a particular time period (scripts can be replayed once per decade, actors and directors age however), and with some luck, fortunes are made.

Music is similar. There are literal hedonic studies of recorded music prices, for example classical CDs, where the recording is decomposed into observable characteristics and those characteristics are related to price (Harchaoui and Hamdad 2000).

My kids watch a lot of anime, and reading Wikipedia, I noticed that Azuma’s (2001) Database Consumption Theory says something similar about anime. The consumer is not mainly consuming a unified narrative. The consumer is consuming elements, character types, visual motifs, settings, relations, and other reusable parts drawn from a shared database. Azuma’s account extends Ōtsuka’s earlier work on narrative consumption, but pushes further away from the primacy of the grand narrative.

Database Consumption is a cultural theory version of economics’ hedonic valuation, decomposing the whole into component characteristics.

As Kirby Ferguson says, Everything is Remix. New art remixes old. And in real estate, new houses recombine elements of older (and sadly, perhaps, not just the successful elements). In cities, new developments do the same for place at large.

Consumers often care more about parts than wholes. Anime reveals those parts, transports them, and reuses them. Many consumers approach the work through them rather than through narrative unity. They see the trees for the forest.¹

References

Rosen, Sherwin. 1974. “Hedonic Prices and Implicit Markets: Product Differentiation in Pure Competition.” Journal of Political Economy 82(1): 34–55.

Azuma, Hiroki. 2009. Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. University of Minnesota Press. English edition of the 2001 Japanese original. (Google Books)

Ōtsuka, Eiji. 2010. “World and Variation: The Reproduction and Consumption of Narrative.” Mechademia 5: 99–116. Translated by Marc Steinberg.

McKenzie, Jordi. 2023. “The economics of movies (revisited): A survey of recent literature.” Journal of Economic Surveys 37(2): 480–525.

Harchaoui, Tarek M., and Malika Hamdad. 2000. “The prices of classical recorded music: a hedonic approach.” International Journal of Industrial Organization 18(3): 497–514.

ChatGPT 5.5 draws anime characters buying real estate

Footnotes

1. And let us not talk about the Star Wars sequels, whose creators (and some fans) thought the series was about laser swords, cute robots, muppets, and blowing up large spherical objects.

FIN