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Preface: What Is Scarce When Content Is Not?

5D Library › The Economics of Attention · 中文

Preface: What Is Scarce When Content Is Not?

In 1971 Herbert Simon, who would win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences seven years later, pointed out something that now looks like a prophecy. Information, he wrote, consumes the attention of whoever receives it, so that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” (Simon 1971). Half a century later the wealth has arrived. Anyone with a phone can publish to the world, and the platforms that carry short video and live commerce show each user a stream that never ends. What has not grown is the number of hours in a day, or the rate at which a human mind can take things in.

This book applies economics to that scarcity. It asks how a resource as limited as human attention is allocated, why the allocation is so unequal, why a live stream can explode or sit empty for reasons that seem to have nothing to do with its quality, how attention turns into a purchase, how platforms, brands, creators and agencies divide the value, and what structured, machine-readable reputation does to the cost of trusting a stranger. It reads these questions beside the oldest Chinese text on markets, Sima Qian’s chapter on the money-makers, and ends with a ledger for creators and brands and a pre-registered trial.

What this book is and is not

This is a book of models. Each chapter takes an established piece of economics, network science or decision theory, states it, and runs it in a short Python program so that the reader can change the numbers and see what happens. The numbers in the programs are illustrative unless a source is given; they show the shape of an argument, not measurements of any platform. Where the book proposes how the models apply to creator commerce, it says so in a hypothesis box, with the result that would show it to be wrong.

Note

This book is not business, investment or legal advice, and it does not promise any result from any marketing strategy. Platforms change their rules and algorithms often; the models here describe mechanisms, not the current settings of any platform.

How to read the boxes

As in the other books of the 5D Library, different kinds of statement are kept apart.

Evidence

Evidence boxes report published findings, with their sources.

Calculation

Calculation boxes give formulas and short Python programs. Every program runs as printed with a standard Python 3 installation, and its output is shown underneath it.

Hypothesis · not established

Hypothesis boxes hold the author’s ideas. They are labelled “not established”, and they say what result would show them to be wrong.

Source text

Source text boxes quote the classical texts, with the author’s translation.

Note

Note boxes give cautions and explain choices.

The plan of the book

  1. Simon’s scarcity law. How much attention a person has in a day, measured in minutes, words and bits, and how a scarce budget is allocated when every source has diminishing returns.
  2. Power laws and scale-free networks. Why audiences concentrate on a few creators: preferential attachment, the Pareto rule and the Gini coefficient, with a simulation of a growing network.
  3. Information cascades and social proof. The Bikhchandani–Hirshleifer–Welch model of herding, and a threshold model that shows why a live room either takes off or stays empty.
  4. The conversion funnel as a Markov chain. From impression to watch, trust and purchase: absorption probabilities, the fundamental matrix, and which link is worth improving.
  5. Two-sided markets and the commission game. Rochet and Tirole’s platform economics, the pricing rule that subsidises one side, and what happens when a platform and an agency both take a cut.
  6. Machine-readable reputation. Coase, Stigler and Akerlof on the cost of trust, and what structured data and knowledge graphs can and cannot do to that cost.
  7. The money-makers of the Shiji. Sima Qian, Bai Gui and Fan Li read beside modern attention allocation.
  8. Practice and a pre-registered trial. A four-week attention ledger for creators and brands, and a randomised trial comparing long-form depth with high-frequency short content on 90-day repeat purchase.

This edition

This is version 1.0.0, the first complete edition: a preface and eight chapters, in Chinese and English. Corrections and references the author has missed are welcome through the 5D Library website.

Disclosure

The author is the founder and chief strategist of Yafu Global and of Asia Influencer X (asiainfluencerx.com), an agency for creators and live commerce in Southeast Asia, and of marketingconsultantasia.com, and so has a direct commercial interest in the creator economy and digital marketing discussed in this book. The book does not promote any service package or price. Every mathematical model, all the Python code and the study protocol are published openly for anyone to test.

References

Simon, Herbert A. 1971. “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World.” In Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest, edited by Martin Greenberger. Johns Hopkins Press.

Fan, Y. (2026). The Economics of Attention: Simon's Scarcity Law, Power-Law Networks and Conversion Funnels in Creator Commerce [注意力的经济学] (Version 1.0.0). 5D Library. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23689302 · Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).