Abstract
This chapter offers a model of blogging activity in which members of blogging communities derive utility from their blog being read as well as from reading others’ blogs. We argue that, in this context, an inverse relation between content produced and attention devoted to others occurs naturally as a result of a competitive equilibrium in an economy where the currency is mutual attention. Such an inverse relation is expressed as follows: in a network, an agent that offers little content compared to others will need to compensate for this by devoting more attention to others in order to maintain her place in the network; conversely, an agent that offers a lot of content compared to others will devote less attention to others. We are able to check the model’s predictions by using a number of measures of activity and involvement in social relations from data gathered on the activity of 2,767 bloggers drawn randomly from http://www.livejournal.comLiveJournal. We argue that the empirical patterns of mutual attention in that sample are broadly consistent with our model.
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© 2012 Alexia Gaudeul, Chiara Peroni, and Laurence Mathieu
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Gaudeul, A., Peroni, C., Mathieu, L. (2012). Blogs and the Economics of Reciprocal Attention. In: Allegrezza, S., Dubrocard, A. (eds) Internet Econometrics. Applied Econometrics Association Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230364226_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230364226_9
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