The only academic work I have found which relates both to my field (entrepreneurship) and to my research interest in attention economics is a study of “The Allocation of Limited Entrepreneurial Attention” by professor Sharon Gifford of Rutgers University.
The core of the book is a mathematical model of the allocation of entrepreneurial attention that is presented in chapter 3. In this post I will write about some of the more significant things I learned and thought about during the first 2 chapters and why I’m sad to know I can’t get through the third chapter just yet.
Attention and the Rose
It might seem trivial that the allocation of attention depends on the value of activities. Gifford also points out that “the value of current activities depends on the allocation of attention to them”. Although by that she seems only to mean that the more you pay attention to a project, the more it is likely to be profitable, I like to think of a more sentimental interpretation. This interpretation is perhaps most beautifully phrased in the words of the fox to the little prince:
It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.
- Antoine de Saint Exupery, The Little Prince (1943)
The Governing Mechanism of Attention Allocation
Another important observation of Gifford is that a crucial problem is the determination of the “habits of thought which help draw our attention to the most important targets.”
This “habits of thought” concept is very important and represents the governing mechanism of attention allocation. In their book “The Politics of Attention”, Jones and Baumgartner point to “emotion” as playing the role of this governing mechanism.
The importance of Trust in the Attention Economy
Gifford observes that information processing “requires time and the value of any particular source of information cannot be known until this investment of time has taken place.”
I think it’s better to replace the word “source” with “piece” in the above quote, because people develop attitudes towards sources of information over time. If they have frequently received high quality valuable information from a certain source in the past, they gain trust in that source. Depending on the amount of trust they have for a source, they may be able to assign probabilities to some aspects of the value of future information from that source.
The importance of trust in an attention economy is a theme I will be writing about again.
Limited Attention and Organization Theory
Some of the most interesting work that Gifford reviews is related to the implications of limited attention for organization theory. The main idea here is that the limits of attention can explain many things about how organizations are designed and how they work. For example delegation of power, and distributed decision making can be seen as mechanisms that help overcome limits of attention in the organization.
Again, more on this later…
The impossible Chapter 3
Before getting to chapter 3 where the mathematical model is presented, I was naively confident that my undergraduate mathematics education would be sufficient for me to understand the math in this chapter. It was not. The model uses sophisticated dynamic programming methods that I think are usually taught at graduate level. And it doesn’t help that the model is presented very densely, with very little guidance in the required background mathematics. So now I have to find a way to gain the necessary background before I can get through this chapter.
Mathematical models almost always involve simplifications of reality, and therefore we cannot expect Gifford’s model to be completely and accurately illustrative of real life attention allocation behavior. It will be interesting for me to spot some of these simplifications in her model because these may be opportunities to develop it further.
