An Economic Response To Unsolicited Communication

Google Tech Talks October 17, 2006 Professor Marshall Van Alstyne received a BA from Yale, and MS & PhD degrees from MIT. He is an Associate Professor at Boston University and a Visiting Professor at MIT. ABSTRACT Recent research applies "information economics" to fighting spam and harnesses market forces in addition to technology and law. This talk will discuss how creating such an attention market can resolve the problem more effectively than even a hypothetical "perfect" filter that has neither false positives nor false negatives. The multi-disciplinary approach blends important ideas for solving pollution problems, based on the Coase Theorem, with signaling and screening. The result creates...