Towards Information Markets: Social Media through an Economic Lens
Social media platforms allow users to generate and subsequently consume content, such as post, comment, blog, wiki, photo, and video, which accommodate a variety of information. Through a market lens
, these platforms appear as information markets–giving users the ability to exchange information at will. The social media based information markets are core institutions that underpin today’s attention economy, as envisioned by Herbert A. Simon (1971) — 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.
Posts
Why did Yahoo Answers fail? Why is Stack Overflow declining? Will Quora survive in 2020? — When are community question answering websites like StackExchange, sustainable? In our recent paper at the Web conference, we investigate CQA sustainability from an economic perspective–providing insights on their successes and failures through an interpretable model.
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Content (post, comment, blog, wiki, photo, video, etc.) production and subsequent consumption is a key part of the social web experience. Every second, on average, several thousand tweets are tweeted on Twitter, which corresponds to several hundred million tweets per day and several hundred billion tweets per year.
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Papers
- The Size Conundrum: Why Online Knowledge Markets Can Fail at Scale
Himel Dev, Chase Geigle, Qingtao Hu, Jiahui Zheng, and Hari Sundaram
The 27th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW), Lyon, France, April, 2018.
Acceptance Rate: 15%
- The Price Conundrum: How Social Media Platforms Can Fail at Pricing.
Himel Dev, Chase Geigle, and Hari Sundaram.
In preparation.