The Macroeconomics of Information and Attention: How People Make Decisions

I was always was wondering how much user attention data companies are sitting on without any real use! If they release that data lot's of interesting stuff might pop up. Amazon/Google/Microsoft/Myspace/Facebook have a lot of these - they should give people access to it, so hackers can start thinking of ways to use it. Both sides win!

For example twitter/friendfeed stream from Amazon browsing and you can share that stream with your friends or public. Bought items, considered items, wished items, reviewed items, songs/books etc. Privacy put aside - it will be a lot of fun to explore some of this data. And yes, you should have the right to sell this data to interested parties.

All of these folks have a lot of such data, but they're hardly just sitting on it. Amazon uses it to push product; Google uses it to measure and improve both organic results and paid advertising; etc.

It would be great to have broader access to this data, and I believe the privacy concerns can be addressed. But it would be asking a lot of these folks to share what may be their most valuable intellectual property: what they've learned from their users.

This post is part of a series that goes through the ten principles from Mankiw's Brief Principles of Macroeconomics (http://www.amazon.com/Brief-Principles-Macroeconomics-Gregor...) and uses them as a jumping off point to analyze information and attention markets. The last of these do try to apply the notion of inflation to these markets.

Where's with the macroeconomics? There is a generally accepted, narrow definition of macroeconomics, and this isn't it.

None of the four basic principles in this post are exclusive to macroeconomics, which deals with the economies of nations at a (you guessed it) macro level, eg. GDP, inflation, unemployment, etc. What macro-level indicators are there in information and attention?

I'm not trained as an economist, but I understand microeconomics to be concerned with the behavior of individuals and macroeconomics to be concerned with the behavior of the economy as a whole. The first 4 of the 10 principles are micro, but the later ones are certainly macro.

actually isnt that supposed to be "micro" rather than "macro" economics?