Summary: Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity, and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems.

In this perspective Thomas H. Davenport and J. C. Beck define the concept of attention as :

“Attention is focused mental engagement on a particular item of information. Items come into our awareness, we attend to a particular item, and then we decide whether to act” (Davenport & Beck 2001, p. 20)

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ECONOMISTS OF ATTENTION

Our recently ended twentieth century overflows with monuments to artistic outrageousness. Never have so many artists flung so many paint pots and puzzles in the face of so many publics: urinals turned upside down and exhibited as art, Rube Goldberg machines that do abstract drawings, canvases that are all white or all black, paintings of Campbell’s soup cans, sculptures of the boxes the soup came in, trenches dug in the desert where nobody can see them, the Pont Neuf in Paris wrapped up in gold cloth for a few days and then unwrapped again.

One strand of this outrageousness isn’t outrageous at all, once we see the lesson it teaches: During the twentieth century, art was undergoing the same reversal from stuff to attention described in chapter 1. Art’s center of gravity henceforth would lie not in objects that artists create but in the attention that the beholder brings to them.

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Information Asymmetry and Thwarting Spam

We explore an alternative approach to spam based on economic rather than technological or regulatory screening mechanisms. We employ a model of email value which supports two intuitive notions: 1) mechanisms designed to promote valuable communication can often outperform those designed merely to block wasteful communication, and 2) designers of such mechansisms should shift focus away from the information in the message to the information known to the sender.

We then use principles of information asymmetry to cause people who knowingly misuse communication to incur higher costs than those who do not. In certain cases, though not all, we can show this approach leaves recipients better off than even an idealized or “perfect” filter that costs nothing and makes no mistakes. Our mechanism also accounts for individual differences in opportunity costs, and allows for bi-directional wealth transfers while facilitating both sender signaling and recipient screening.

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Optional: Innovation Economics

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