Word of mouth and feedback loops

The courtyard of the Pleasance at the Ediinburgh fringe is a great place to observe the impact of feedback loops in shaping consumer preferences.

Bar the household names or comics with a cult following, most fringe venues and performers are perpetually desperate for ‘bums on seats’ and will find any legal way to persuade people to come.

Countless fliers are thrust into the hands of fringe-goers as they wander around or emerge from a performance into the daylight.

But 99.9% of these people are wasting their time. Regulars at the fringe - and believe me there are thousands who make an annual pilgrimmage to the festival - know that the best guides to what is worth seeing can be found not from another glossy flier - but simply by asking the people around you in the queue.

It boils down to word of mouth in casual and fleeting conversations as we wait patiently to see another show - what is hot and what is not - and these dscussions can make or break a fringe show over the course of the three weeks.

The second most important influence is the show review - but here seasoned veterans of the fringe know full well that many of the reviews have been written by the mates of those performing or by critics with an axe to grind. And anyway, by the time a 5-star show has been reviewed in the Herald, the Scotsman or Three Weeks- the show is probably already sold-out.

No ... the best way to find out what to see is simple - start a conversation. Standard economics tends to assume that our preferences are independent of each other - the Edinburgh fringe is a different animal.