Digital Attention Intermediaries

This article is based on a report commissioned by the GSMA but prepared in complete independence, which has been released as Peitz (2020) and for which I received useful comments from Serafmo Abate, Alexandre de Streel, and Giorgio Monti. I gratefully acknowledge support from Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) through CRC TR 224 (Project B05). Disclosure: I was an external economic expert on the Digital Platform Inquiry of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commision (ACCC) advising on topics related to this article. This article provides a guide to the world of digital attention intermediaries and concludes with a discussion of several policy issues with a focus on competition policy and consumer protection. It addresses the following questions: How do attention intermediaries operate in the real world? What are economic mechanisms that may contribute to understanding markets with digital attention intermediaries? Recent insights from the economics of platforms and media economics inform the replies to these questions.