In this week’s New Yorker financial page, an economic look at the myth of the box-office weekend (“Open Wide,” Aug. 4, 2003). My favorite phrase from the article is “non-informative information cascade.” Use that instead of “buzz” the next time you refer to all the Hollywood promotion that gets rolled out several months, seasons, human gestation periods, before a movie actually opens.
And if you really want to read more in this vein, I found a paper entitled “Movie Stars, Big Budgets, and Wide Releases: Empirical Analysis of the Blockbuster Strategy” (PDF, 584k), complete with the kind of mathematical-symbol-laden econometrics that I see everyday at work and pretend to know something about. (It’s all Greek to me. Literally.)
“Non-informative information cascade” could equally well refer to the constant blathering coming from the White House, or the kinds of conversations I have with my father to avoid getting into an argument.
“that I see everyday at work and pretend to know something about…”
Oh, whatever, Mr. “I know more about zoonoses than Rajani and she’s in med school…”! ;)