The Multiplicity of Attributions of Authenticity and Audience Evaluation

The study of authenticity has grown rapidly in recent decades, along with the proliferation of various concepts of authenticity. Although recent frameworks have emerged that attempt to integrate these studies, they are fraught with problems. To this end, this paper establishes a more systematic and comprehensive framework and examines the relationships between different attributions of authenticity and audience evaluation. Drawing on millions of online reviews from the Chinese film market from 2002 to 2022 and a state-of-art language representation model, BERT, our results show that almost all types of authenticity (except type authenticity) increase audience evaluation. Besides, ethical, craft, and realism authenticity can exert a stronger positive influence on audience evaluation than moral, type, and essentialism authenticity, respectively. The study advances authenticity literature by clarifying the attributions of authenticity and their distinct impact on the audience and introducing a new approach to quantify authenticity. © 2023 Academy of Management