Special Interest Group on CRAP

I recently submitted a paper with the title “income Inequality in the Attention Economy’. This is my first paper in welfare economics, and the results in the paper came as a surprise to me. Among other things it shows that an increasing amount of attention is concentrated on a tiny number of websites. Among over 200 million websites (suitably defined), fully 50% of the traffic falls in only 1000 web sites. If you look only at the top one million websites (ignoring the bottom 199 million web sites), then the same thing is true - only 0.1% of the websites in this group get 50% of the traffic. In other words, in the attention economy of the web, the rich are getting richer.

It’s interesting to speculate about why this is true, and what the implications are for “heavy tail markets” that economists have spoken about lately. Suffice it to say that I was surprised by the results!

The paper is available here.