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Huberman & Wu: Attention Economics

Bernardo Huberman e-mailed last week to let me know of a new work he'd co-authored with Fang Wu. Entitled "The Economics of Attention: Maximizing User Value in Information-Rich Environments" (paper PDF), the paper presents a mathematical model which, given a set of attributes on pieces of information and a requirement that only a small subset of those items can be displayed to a user, maximizes the users utility, in the economic sense.

If you thought that sentence was a brainfull, you should see the math in the paper. Usually, with paitience and persistence, I can work out the math in a technical paper. However, this one uses terminology common to fields I've never been conversant in, and I have to admit this paper is a bit beyond my meager mathematical skills. Thankfully, the sections with the greek symbols are wrapped by a pretty straightforward context and example.

If efficiently iimplementable, this would be the type of mechanism I'd put inside a webfeed aggregator to creep one step closer to The Celestial Daily Me.

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