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Recommender Systems and the New New Economics of Information

Published: 27 August 2017 Publication History

Abstract

George Stigler pioneered the economics of information in the 1960s with his observation that information is a scarce and valuable commodity. Stigler assumed people value information to the extent, and only to the extent, that it helps them to make better decisions, and that people update their beliefs rationally, in response to new information. Stigler won the Nobel prize for his contribution, as did three economists, George Akerlof, Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz ten years later. This second wave of research, that came to be called the "new economics of information" adhered to Stigler's assumptions, but examined consequences of asymmetric information -- i.e., the fact that interacting individuals often possess different information sets. In this talk I will discuss my research on four phenomena that are key to the information age that don't fit neatly into either wave of economic research on information: curiosity (the desire for information for its own sake), privacy (the desire to withhold information), information avoidance (a phenomenon that Stigler's theory explicitly ruled out), and the desire to share information. The last of these topics is most relevant to recommender systems, so I will devote special attention to it, discussing some of the fundamental motives that drive people to share information.

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cover image ACM Conferences
RecSys '17: Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM Conference on Recommender Systems
August 2017
466 pages
ISBN:9781450346528
DOI:10.1145/3109859
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 27 August 2017

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Author Tags

  1. curiosity
  2. economics of information
  3. information avoidance
  4. information sharing privacy

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RecSys '17
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RecSys '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 26 of 125 submissions, 21%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 254 of 1,295 submissions, 20%

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