Information Congestion

Simon P. Anderson (1) , André de Palma (2, 3)

1 Department of Economics, University of Virginia
2 X-DEP-ECO - Département d'Économie de l'École Polytechnique
3 ENS Cachan - École normale supérieure - Cachan

Advertising messages vie for scarce attention. “Junk” mail, “spam” e-mail, and telemarketing calls need both parties to exert effort to generate transactions. Message recipients supply attention depending on average message benefit, while senders are motivated by profits. Costlier message transmission may improve message quality so more messages are examined. Too many messages may be sent, or the wrong ones. A Do-Not-Call policy beats a ban, but too many individuals opt out. A monopoly gatekeeper performs better than personal access pricing if nuisance costs to receivers are moderate.

Domaines: Gestion et management; Economies et finances

Simon P. Anderson, André de Palma. Information Congestion. 2008. ⟨hal-00349516⟩