CHAPTER 1Foundations of the Shopper Economy

SHOPPER CURRENCY

Today there is a new currency that extends beyond the dollar. It is made possible by digital technology, and it can be minted by anyone who has a cellphone. This new currency is behavior.

In the groundbreaking book The Attention Economy, a Nobel Prize winner, Herbert Simon, is quoted as saying:

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

We hardly need a Nobel Prize winner to tell us that we have a poverty of attention—most of our daily lives are a testament to this. But from an economic standpoint, attention is scarce, and scarcity creates value. Attention is so valuable that ...

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