attention allocation in information-rich environments the.pdfVIP

Attention Allocation in Information-Rich Environments: The Case of News Aggregators Mihai Calin, Elia Palme, Juliana Sutanto Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Scheuchzerstrasse 7 8092 Zürich, Switzerland {mcalin, epalme, jsutanto}@ethz.ch Chrysanthos Dellarocas Boston University 595 Commonwealth Avenue Boston, MA 02215, USA dell@ September 12, 2012 Preliminary and i ncomplete draftfor WISE 2012 submission only. Please do not circulate without permission from author. Full paper will be provided before the day of the workshop. 1 ABSTRACT News aggregators have emerged as an important component of digital content ecosystems, attracting traffic by hosting collections of links to third party content, but also creating conflict with content producers. Aggregators provide titles and short summaries (snippets) of articles they link to. Content producers claim that their presence deprives them of traffic that would otherwise flow to their sites. In light of this controversy, we conduct a series of field experiments whose objective is to provide insight with respect to how readers allocate their attention between a news aggregator and the original articles it links to. Our experiments are based on manipulating elements of the user interface of a Swiss mobile news aggregator. We examine how key design parameters, such as the length of the text snippet that an aggregator provides about articles, the presence of associated photos as well