The attention economy: how looks become commodities

At the same time, considering attention as an authentic resource represents an important conceptual advance because it extends economic science to the explicit study of mental, rather than just physical, production. An analysis of attention also provides a more nuanced understanding of other intangible factors of production that have become pillars of economic thinking, such as human capital, information, and technology" (2025, p. 1039).

There is no shortage of reasons for economists to deal with the subject of attention in Loewenstein and Wojtowicz's approach. One can add the fact that attention interacts with both production and consumption. Many activities, in fact, are to a large extent, consumption of attention: if you do not focus you do not produce value.

If you don't notice us, you don't buy our products. In an economy where platforms and apps sell 'engagement', effort and mental time are currency. Then there are a whole series of seemingly anomalous behaviours, in the financial sphere, for example, such as exaggerated reactions to positive or negative news, the systematic underestimation of systemic risks, procrastination and the little weight we give to deadlines, which can be understood more accurately if we think that information has to compete for the scarce resource that is our attention.

Finally, there is another particularly relevant issue that concerns the implications arising from the increasingly massive use of artificial intelligence tools. Many of these, in fact, subtract attention, others amplify it, and still others redistribute it. Understanding whether AI replaces or supplements human attention is crucial to predicting how work and income distribution will change in the near future.

In 2013, Daniel Goleman published his book entitled Focus. He writes it 'for the well-being of generations to come'. Like others (still too few alas), Goleman realised that in the age of infinite solutions, countless stimuli and knowledge within everyone's reach, one of the resources most in short supply is that of our attention.

But what exactly do we mean when we talk about 'attention'? For the American Psychological Association, it is "a state in which cognitive resources are focused on some aspects of the environment rather than others". Loewenstein and Wojtowicz, synthesising a large number of studies, propose to define it through four key characteristics. Attention is, first of all, 'scarce', i.e. we do not have an infinite amount of it; it is 'rival', i.e., it is consumed by use; if you focus on one object or process, you cannot focus on anything else; it is 'cognitive', i.e., it is necessary to obtain and process information; finally, it is at least partially 'volitional', i.e., we can, within certain limits, decide where to direct it, through looking or thinking.

One begins to understand, perhaps, why defined in this way it is not strange to think of attention as a productive factor, on a par with land or capital, with opportunity costs and markets taking shape around it. An especially scarce and paradoxical resource. Already in 1977, the Nobel Prize winner in economics Herbert Simon noted how an excessive wealth of information could lead, paradoxically precisely, to a poverty of attention and how a good decision theory should also deal with "the processes of selecting the aspects of the environment on which to focus attention, the processes of generating alternatives, and the processes of choosing between alternatives. In the design of these processes, conservation of attention and computational effort,' Simon writes, 'is a fundamental issue' (Simon, H. A., & Blumenthal, M. Models of discovery: And other topics in the methods of science. Springer, 1986).

But economics is not only concerned with defining what 'resources' are, but also with discussing how these are allocated. As far as attention is concerned, we can identify three basic allocative processes. The first is a process that we can define as 'bottom-up' or stimulus-driven: attention is activated and directed as an automatic response to external elements, such as light, colours, movement, but also social stimuli such as the gaze of others or a voice calling our name. The second process can be defined, in contrast, as 'top-down' or goal-driven: will, intentions, plans and beliefs make us direct our attention to some particular aspects and not others. We look for useful information to make a decision, so we read or search the web for what we need; if we want to pass an exam, we focus on books and resist the temptation to scroll through our social pages. The third process is 'motivational' in nature, it is driven by emotions: visceral emotional states such as boredom and curiosity that influence the voluntary control of attention. If we get bored we change channel or stop reading, if something intrigues us we are driven to greater concentration, if we get into the 'flow', then nothing can divert our attention from what we are doing, writing, listening. This process works as a sort of 'automatic pilot' that saves us from having to deliberate each time on the choice of what to devote our attention to.

What does the economics of attention tell us again about the great classical themes of economics. Let us start with consumption. Here we can better understand how 'salience' directs choices. What is salient, in fact, assumes preponderant weight in our evaluations. When a product has many characteristics - price, weight, quality - the way these are presented changes the distribution of attention and thus our choices. Faced with several elements that may influence our decisions, we do not consider them all, precisely because our attention span is limited, but we sample them. When oneop of the elements is made more salient, then our attention is diverted to the one that becomes dominant in influencing the choice. This is the case with shrinkflation. We see that packet of pasta that we used to pay one and a half euros for is now advertised on the supermarket shelf for only one euro. We buy it and only later, perhaps, do we realise that there is only 400 grams of pasta in this packet and not the 500 in traditional packs. Price is a salient dimension, which captures our attention, quantity does not.

The same applies to the relationship between salience and probabilistic judgements. Because vividness beats statistics. Hence the 'visceral risks' associated with rare but salient events - shark attacks, plane crashes, violent crime - cause such events to be overestimated compared to statistically more lethal but less impressive risks, such as cardiovascular disease or diabetes. This leads to policies and consumption that do not reflect real probabilities but public perceptions.

These phenomena also have a social dimension that stems from our interaction with others because very often what others do captures our attention. What is perceived as a social norm, because we see that it is what others generally do in a certain situation, automatically becomes more salient and influences our willingness to cooperate or generates conformity. The immediate and unexpected success of certain fashions, products, venues, artists or sayings are all manifestations of a collective attention that focuses on one object rather than another. One of the many balances on which choices could have been focused.

Another relevant aspect is the fact that attention shapes memory: what captures the mind is more likely to be memorised, and what it memorises fuels future choices. This is why limited attention sometimes generates exaggerated reactions while at other times only inertia, all depending on the complexity of the environment and how the information is presented and stored.

In education, every moment of lost attention is a bit of ungenerated human capital. An hour of class missed or poorly attended by a student who may be playing with his or her mobile phone the whole time results in skills that are not acquired and will probably never be recovered. The implications are clear. There is a need to invest in the way the educational environment is designed so that attention is activated and maintained in the learning process. It is not enough for a teacher to say the right things if these are not received by his or her students.

For the functioning of organisations, considering the role of attention can also provide interesting insights. The literature on so-called 'choking' shows, for example, how over-incentivising workers can cause performance to deteriorate because it jams the attention mechanism. When the stakes are very high, attention is shifted to the reward and the risk of losing it and is taken away from the task at hand, which then suffers. Thus, increasing bonuses is not always the best way to promote performance.

In next week's Mind the Economy we will try to explore the operational implications of the attention economy. The risks and possible countermeasures.

For now, we leave off by pointing out that while the economy was once essentially measured in hectares of land, tons of coal and steel, and hours of work, today it is increasingly measured in moments of concentration and rapt attention. Attention is the most important currency of the economy of the near future that is already here. Invisible, but capable of determining who prospers and who falls behind. And it is precisely on how we know how to govern it that not only the development of our economy will depend, but the quality of our democratic and social life.