Mechanisms by which precursor awards influence Academy Awards voting

Determine the causal mechanisms through which outcomes of precursor awards such as the Directors Guild Awards, Screen Actors’ Guild Awards, BAFTA, and the Golden Globes influence voting preferences in the Academy Awards.

Background

In contrasting Oscars prediction with macroeconomic forecasting, the authors note that precursor award outcomes are historically predictive of Oscar results, yet the causal reason for this influence is not established.

Understanding this mechanism would clarify the structure of information aggregation and social influence in awards voting, which is relevant both to human decision-making and to modeling tasks that rely on such signals.