An emerging branch of economics that models attention as a scarce, rivalrous resource alongside land, labour and capital. Time spent on one activity cannot be spent on another; focus, being vital to most forms of work, aids production and can be consumed in leisure.
Herbert Simon, who won both the Turing award (1975) and the Nobel prize in economics (1978), coined the term "bounded rationality" and observed that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. In 2003 Christopher Sims of Princeton University developed a "rational inattention" model in which optimising agents can process only so much information at a time, explaining the smooth rather than instant adjustment of macroeconomic variables to new information.
Treating attention as a scarce resource helps bridge the gap between traditional models of Homo economicus—a rational optimiser—and the figure who emerges from behavioural economics, who is pulled away from rational thinking by biases. Consumers consistently fall for "left-digit bias" (far more likely to buy something for $2.99 than $3.00) because attention is scarce and people rely on shortcuts.
Attentional resources include working memory, selective concentration and visual focus. A recent review by George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University and Zachary Wojtowicz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology notes that "pay attention" could mean either "look at this" or "stop daydreaming"—subtly different actions that are aggregated into a single category with its own analytical problems.
Economic models of attention allocation divide roughly into two categories. Top-down models follow a typical economic paradigm in which the agent chooses the best use of a scarce resource. Bottom-up models recognise that the environment itself directs attention—the ping from a phone, a child running into the road—and that emotional states such as pain, boredom and hunger can do the same.
Attention is not covered by property rights. The spread of smartphones and social media has created a world in which it is easy to capture through algorithms that constantly adjust to maximise user engagement. Simon used the scissors metaphor: decisions come from a combination of individual limitations and the informational environment, and willpower alone is unlikely to defeat perfectly tuned distraction machines.
To err is human, to forgive unusual.