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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Signaux qualitatifs et phénomène de star

subject

description

The superstar phenomenon describes a situation wherein few artists dominate the activity in which they engage and earn significant amounts of money. Most of models, trying to explain this phenomenon, take place clearly on the product market where artists provide ultimate and consumers. We adopt here a different approach by taking place on the labour market regrouping artists (whose the services are production factors) and employers (the producers of cultural products) and we demonstrate that die strategies, consisting in minimizing search costs under contraint of quality maximisation, can work towards explaining the emergence of a very unequal distribution of artistic incomes. In order to minimize search costs, the employer, who wants to take on talented people, can use three types of qualitative signals : the engagements rythm, the fee and the reputation in professional community. The model of informational cascades of Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer and Welch (1992) on the one hand and Towse (1992, 1995) on the other hand demonstrate respectively how the use of engagements rythm and the use of fee as qualitative signal can lead to a concentration of demand on the same artist. As for our contribution, it exhibits that the employer’s strategy, consisting in using the « exchange system » (« réseau échange ») and the reputation diffused by this network, can also lead to a polarization of labour demand on few artists. Then, the star phenomenon don’t must be considered like a strictly economic phenomenon but like a socio-economic phenomenon insofar as social structures, like the « exchange-system » (« réseau échange ») can contribute to the emergence of economic disparities between an elite (the stars) and theothers artists.