The death of an artist can act as a costly signal of their authenticity, and cause enduring changes in audience valuations of their work. Drawing on novel digital trace data of audience evaluations from a major online music community, we show how the death of an hip-hop artist induces improvements to the valuations of their antemortem work. Such death-induced changes to audience valuations are mediated by the ability of some deaths – what we term iconic deaths – to act as costly signals of an artist’s authenticity. Iconic deaths that better signal authenticity produce greater death-induced improvements in audience valuations. Such costly signaling effects are more salient within discredited subgenres of hip-hop. We show how this is robust to complementary explanations, such as sympathetic eulogizing or audience expansion effects.

中文翻译：

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最昂贵的真实性信号？标志性死亡如何改变嘻哈音乐中观众的接受度


艺术家的去世可以成为他们真实性的代价高昂的信号，并导致观众对其作品的评价发生持久的变化。借鉴来自主要在线音乐社区的观众评价的新数字跟踪数据，我们展示了嘻哈艺术家的去世如何导致他们生前作品估值的提高。这种由死亡引起的观众评价变化是由一些死亡的能力中介的——我们称之为标志性的死亡——作为艺术家真实性的代价高昂的信号。更好地表明真实性的标志性死亡会对观众评价产生更大的死亡诱导改善。这种代价高昂的信号效应在声名狼藉的嘻哈子流派中更为突出。我们展示了这对互补解释（例如同情赞美或受众扩展效应）的稳健性。