Estimating the potential of collaborating professionals, with an application to the Dutch film industry

Professionals often collaborate in projects. Some of these projects require funding, so before the collaboration can start a proposal for the project is submitted. This proposal will then be evaluated by a committee. The goal of the committee is to recognise proposals that are likely to be very successful. In this paper, we introduce a new numerical method to estimate the expected potential of a proposal. This method helps in identifying proposals that may turn out to be the most successful. The estimation is derived from the past performances of the professionals involved and takes into account the uncertainty of a contribution of a professional to a proposal. We apply our method to the Dutch film industry. We estimate the potential of proposals for new films released in 2010. The value of a film depends on the number of visitors in cinemas and the artistic prizes won. Our estimates are very good, indicating that past performances of filmmakers provide a very good indication of the potential of
their new film. As a by-product of our method, rankings of producers, directors, and screenwriters of Dutch films up to 2011 are obtained.