THE ECONOMICS OF ATTENTION: MAXIMIZING USER VALUE IN INFORMATION-RICH ENVIRONMENTS

Bernardo A. Huberman () and Fang Wu ()
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Bernardo A. Huberman: HP Labs, Palo Alto, CA 94306, USA
Fang Wu: HP Labs, Palo Alto, CA 94306, USA

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), 2008, vol. 11, issue 04, pages 487-496

Abstract: A distinguishing feature of the information era is the saliency of people's attention as a scarce resource. Unlike an earlier time when information was a valuable resource, its easy availability has shifted the focus to the limited bandwidth that people can devote to ubiquitous media and news. With this in mind, we introduce an automatic configuration mechanism that generates the most relevant information to be presented to limited attention users. It also guarantees to maximize their total expected utility from the information they receive. A computationally efficient algorithm is used to assign an index value to each information item, which then determines whether or not a given item appears in the top list presented to users at a given time.

Keywords: Economics of attention; search engine; dual-speed restless bandit problem (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008

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