Revealed Preference in Information Networks
Robert Ackland (ANU)
NICTA SML SEMINARDATE: 2012-05-17
TIME: 11:15:00 - 12:00:00
LOCATION: NICTA - 7 London Circuit
CONTACT: JavaScript must be enabled to display this email address.
ABSTRACT:
Revealed preference is one of the most influential concepts in economics. It provides a framework for testing whether a set of demand data (quantities of goods consumed at different prices) is consistent with the existence of a representative consumer maximising a utility function. This leads to the construction of bounds to true index numbers showing, for example, the change in the cost of living in a country between two time points or the difference in real income between two countries. In this presentation, I provide a brief introduction to revealed preference and then present my exploratory work on using revealed preference to model behaviour in information networks (e.g. Twitter, blog networks, WWW, online fora). This involves conceptualising participants in information sharing networks as agents who are making rational decisions about the consumption and production of information, subject to exogenous prices. The approach can be used to identify sets of individuals who share common preferences for consuming and producing information, allowing the construction of novel and economically-informed indexes of behaviour in information networks.
BIO:
Robert Ackland is an Associate Professor in the Australian Demographic & Social Research Institute at the Australian National University, where he conducts empirical social science research into online social and organizational networks. He leads the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks project (http://voson.anu.edu.au), coordinates the ANU's Master of Social Research programme and teaches on the social science of the Internet and online research methods. Robert has degrees in economics from the University of Melbourne, Yale University (where he was a Fulbright Scholar) and the ANU, where he gained his PhD in 2001. He has been chief investigator on four Australian Research Council grants and in 2007, he was a UK National Centre for e-Social Science Visiting Fellow and James Martin Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute.
