Cost of time and attention in mass communication systems

Modern technology combined with market efficiency has made the production, duplication and distribution of information easier and cheaper than ever before. With large quantities of information reaching the public, the bottleneck in the communication process is often the limited attention of the people who receive all these messages. Yet the cost of public attention has traditionally been neglected or treated as an externality in economic valuation, rather than being quantified into a dollar figure that is comparable to other costs in the communication process.;This dissertation develops a model for valuing the dollar cost of attention time based on the wage model, postulating that the average cost of time is greater than or equal to the wage rate. The model has been tested in several areas, such as transportation economics and marketing, to verify that it is consistent with our knowledge in other academic fields. The model has been then applied to two mass communication systems -- direct marketing and broadcast television. The first application shows that the inclusion of the cost of consumer time may make direct marketing economically undesirable, explaining public annoyance with telemarketing and spam and showing that regulation against intrusive communication can be justified with economic arguments and not just privacy ones. The second application shows big inefficiencies in advertising-funded visual broadcasting systems and suggests that current dynamics can drastically change the television industry in the near future.;Further implications of this work may be broad and deep. The wage model may be applied to many other areas where the importance of leisure time is recognized but not formally assigned a dollar value. The ability to describe the time cost of leisure activities in economic terms can constitute a bridge between business and social arguments and helps to put the economic sphere in proper perspective within society. Finally, the effective assignment of property rights in time can cause people to consider their time differently and enhance the value of what they do with it.