Economics of Attention

A Panel to look at how the attention economy is informing new business models in advertising, media, and design.


Panelists included Richard A. Lanham, Professor Emeritus of English at UCLA and author of The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information, and David Merkoski, Creative Director at frog design. Marty Kaplan, Director of the Norman Lear Center, moderated.


Richard A. Lanham is probably most widely known for his textbooks on revising prose to improve style and clarify thought. He is also a notable scholar of the history of rhetoric who has published notable books on the subject. His latest work, The Economics of Attention, was published in 2006 by the University of Chicago Press.


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)


In accordance with Wikipedia, Herbert Simon was perhaps the first person to articulate the concept of attention economics when he wrote:

"...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it" (Simon 1971, p. 40-41).

He noted that many designers of information systems incorrectly represented their design problem as information scarcity rather than attention scarcity, and as a result they built systems that excelled at providing more and more information to people, when what was really needed were systems that excelled at filtering out unimportant or irrelevant information (Simon 1996, p. 143-144).

In recent years, Simon's characterization of the problem of information overload as an economic one has become more popular. Business strategists such as Thomas H. Davenport or Michael H. Goldhaber have adopted the term "attention economy" (Davenport & Beck 2001).

Some writers have even speculated that "attention transactions" will replace financial transactions as the focus of our economic system (Goldhaber 1997, Franck 1999). Information systems researchers have also adopted the idea, and are beginning to investigate mechanism designs which build on the idea of creating property rights in attention.