April 21st 2009, Conference of the Royal Economic Society

Blogs and the economics of

reciprocal (in)attention
Alexia Gaudeul,
Chiara Peroni and
Laurence Mathieu.
Outline of the presentation

1. Blogs, context and motivations.

2. Objectives of the research
3. The norm of reciprocity
4. The dataset: Livejournal friendship patterns.
5. Empirical Analysis.
6. Conclusion and further research.
Context of the paper

 Growth in participation in Internet-mediated non-

monetary participative processes
Social networking, open source software, wikis, social news
websites such as digg or reddit, etc...
 Particularly important for companies that manage
communities of self-motivated individuals.
eBay, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook.
 Also important for media, culture, journalism...
Motivations for blogging

Different reasons for blogging.

Make friends.
Interacting with other bloggers and in
communities.
Become popular and well-known.
Expressing oneself and publicizing own work.
Update far located and dispersed real life friends
(web presence…).
Results
 Study of the behaviour of bloggers.
We show that attention and content are the currencies
of trade within bloggers’ networks.
We evidence the importance of reciprocity norms in
blogging networks.
A model of content production (1)
1 e
1

n21 n31
n12 n13
n23
2 3 e3
e2 n32
 ei effort by agents i.
 Agent i devotes attention nij to the content produced by j
and nik to the content produced by k.
A model of content production (2)

 A simple additive form for the total utility of agent is:

Ui(n,e) = d sumj≠i nji ei + sumj≠i nij ej - C(ei)

Utility from Utility from Cost of
being read reading others content
production

 Content producers choose how much attention to

devote to each other and how much content to produce.
A model of content production (3)

 We suppose there is
Free entry and exit in the blogging market
Perfect information on the activity of each bloggers.
‘Attention budget’ T, the same for all agents.
Attention shared equally between all friends.
Number of friends’ readers independent of one’s number of
friends
Hypothesis

 H1: Network size: Bloggers who display higher levels

of content production and general blogging activity will
have a higher number of friends.
 H2: Network imbalances: Bloggers with more readers
(‘friend of’) than readees (‘friends’) will produce more
content than others.
Norm of reciprocity: Caveats!

 Other possible forms of reciprocity

A friend for a friend.
A comment for a comment.
Reciprocate only if content of high enough quality.
 Other possible motivations: reader only, writer only.
 External effects, e.g. ‘real world’ celebrities.
 Limitations in the data available
The dataset: LiveJournal

 Livejournal is essentially an aggregation tool with lock-

in effect
Write and read public and private entries
Participate in communities and exchange comments
 Use of proxies for attention exchanged and expended
from a number of bloggers’ activity.
Content production (posting per day)
Interaction (comments, community participation)
Commitment (length of time active)
The dataset: LiveJournal

 2767 users.
 Main characteristics (median):
Three years’ activity (and counting!).
One post every two days. Each receive 1.5 comments.
Balance between friends / readers (26 / 25).
Balance between comments received / made.
Membership in 14 communities.
Friends vs. friends of
Reciprocity equation
ln(friends ofi)=a+b*ln(friends)+ui

ln(friends of) se t-value P>|t|

ln(friends) 0.985*** 0.005 208.98 0.000
constant 0.103 0.017 6.07 0.000
obs 2496
R2 0.942
F (1, 2494) 43673***
BP 9.39 (0.002)
RESET 3.41 (0.017)

***: <1%;**: <5%;*: <10%

Regressions (1)

 Activity equation 1 to test H1:

ln(friend ofi)=cXi+vi
with Xi a matrix of independent variables measuring the
activity of the blogger i
 Activity equation 2 to test H2:
ln(friend ofi/friendsi)=dXi+wi
with Xi a matrix of independent variables measuring the
activity of the blogger i.
Activity equation 1 and 2

Dependent ln(friends of) ln(friends of/friends)

variable:
ln(communities) 0.152*** 0.170*** -0.030***
ln(entries) 0.579*** 0.576*** -0.007
ln(comments 0.776*** 0.742*** 0.070***
received per post)
ln(comments -0.463*** -0.525*** 0.138***
made per friends)
ln(duration) 0.601*** 0.603*** -0.025***
ln(friends of/friends) 0.474***
constant 0.781*** 0.950*** 0.240***
obs 1334 1334 1357
adj R2 0.880 0.902 0.275
F stat 1550*** 1646*** 83***

***: <1%;**: <5%;*: <10%

Additional regressions

 ln(readersi/friendsi) instrumented by Xi.

Shows that deviating from the norm of reciprocity has a
negative effect on number of readers and friends.
 Use of a measure of network asymmetry
Shows that part of the effect is due to asymmetry, not
imbalance, in a blogger’s network of relations.
Conclusion

 Activity significant predictor of size of friend list

Which comes first?
Topic for further study based on panel data set.
 Interpretation of ‘reciprocity norm’: does a ‘balanced’
friends list lead to more or less friends?
Those who care about reciprocity may be less willing to
friend others (risk of friendship not returned).
Those who care about reciprocity may reciprocate more,
thus accumulating more friends over time.
Net effect is ambiguous, as seen in contradiction in results
of OLS and IV regression.
Future research

 Is there saturation in reciprocation, i.e. limit to the size

of a blogger’s network?
 Further research in the effect of systematically
reciprocating or to not reciprocating.
--> Collection and analysis of panel data
Do you befriend (link) because of content produced, or do
you produce content because of friends?
 Further analysis of reciprocation at the individual level.