Understanding online attention and user-generated content creation: An information consumption and production perspective

There is a strong practical need for methods for understanding and measuring online behaviour. In this project, economic index number theory will be used to study information consumption, leading to new ways of measuring online attention and influence. Techniques for studying scaling relationships in the physical world will be used to study information production, leading to new insights into the efficiency of production of user-generated content. The project will contribute to understanding how social media such as Twitter contribute to social unrest and affect consumer decisions, and how distributed online collaboration can produce economically-valuable information resources such as Wikipedia.