The Production and Consumption of Social Media
将社交媒体建模为用户生产和消费内容的集合，发现注意力交换（互相关注）显著影响内容生产和消费模式，并通过Twitter和Instagram调查验证，为平台设计提供启示。
We model social media as collections of users producing and consuming content. Users value consuming content, but due to scarce attention, they may not value all content from other users. Users also value receiving attention, creating the incentive to attract an audience by producing valuable content but also through attention bartering—users mutually becoming each other’s audience. Attention bartering shapes substantially the patterns of production and consumption on social media, explains key features of social media behavior and platform decision making, and yields sharp predictions that are consistent with data we collect from #EconTwitter. We conduct Twitter and Instagram user surveys that yield additional direct evidence in support of attention bartering, and we discuss the implications of attention bartering for the design of social media platforms. This paper was accepted by Joshua Gans, business strategy. Supplemental Material: The online appendices and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.00060 .