Friday, 16 March 2018: 10:30 AM
The rapid growth of information causes scarcity of attention. Therefore, in a digital economy it is useful to have securities-like instruments derived from traffic and other popularity proxies; this is of special interest in the case of unlisted companies, where sources of traditional financial performance metrics are uncertain or incomplete. In the Artificial Intelligence Economy three elements define the relationship between human (supply and demand) and machine: (i) clarifying objectives, (ii) defining what should be optimized, and (iii) providing insights into the operational context. Matching supply and demand in popularity markets is an exercise in allocating resources, where the revealed preferences of agents (the supply of attention) is given by attention prices and volumes, that can be studied effectively using the tools of technical analysis and charting. Our research question is as following: “Can tools familiar to investors, such as technical analysis charting, be used to study attention price?” In our study we use monthly and daily click stream and social network data from Twitter, Google AdWords, JumpShot.com, SEMrush.com for the full year of 2015 and January of 2016 and three different media sites. The sources used for this were Similar Group Ltd., Searchmetrics, and IBM Watson Analytics. We measure attention by the engagement of visitors, implicitly assuming that given the inconvenience of switching news providers, users will tend to form the habit of preferring a particular source of information –therefore, forming a circuit or network. We demonstrated how technical analysis tools are suitable to study attention pricing, which opens the door to the development of formal frameworks to operate popularity markets, by defining trading strategies that might be applicable to investment decision making in marketing, venture capital, and also fully automated-artificial intelligence consumer products. As a future area of study it will be interesting to look into the possible attention-trust trade off, as common business wisdom usually suggests that gaining attention involves the risk of losing trust.