Attention Oligopoly

Prat, Andrea; Valletti, Tommaso

Attention Oligopoly

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 2022, vol. 14, issue 3, 530-57

Abstract: We model digital platforms as attention brokers that have proprietary information about their users' product preferences and sell targeted ad space to retail product industries. Retail producers—incumbents or entrants—compete for access to this attention bottleneck. We discuss when increased concentration among attention brokers results in a tightening of the attention bottleneck, leading to higher ad prices, fewer ads being sold to entrants, and lower consumer welfare in the product industries. The welfare effect is characterized in terms of patterns of individual usage across platforms. A merger assessment that relies on aggregate platform usage alone can be highly biased.

JEL-codes: D43 D83 G34 L81 L86 M37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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DOI: 10.1257/mic.20200134

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