Advertising is Flirtation

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Speaker
James H. Morris
Professor of Computer Science and Dean of the West Coast Campus, Carnegie Mellon University

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

The success advertising-funded Google and expectations of great turmoil in the media business makes me curious about how advertising really works. While there is considerable economic literature on the economics of advertising, little of it deals with the micro-level interaction of advertiser and consumer. Guided by Herbert Simon’s remark that “We suffer from a plenty of information and a deficit of attention,” some have proposed models in which information exchange is treated as a value transaction. I believe this is wrong and that advertising should be analyzed as a flirtation device like the peacock’s tail. Ways of substantiating this belief, notably a study of the magazine industry are considered.

Speaker's Bio

Dr. James H. Morris is a professor of Computer Science and dean of the West Coast Campus of Carnegie Mellon University. From 1992 to 2004 he served as department head, then dean in the School of Computer Science. He held the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Human-Computer Interaction from 1997 to 2000. He is a native of Pittsburgh and received a Bachelor’s degree from Carnegie Mellon, an M.S. in Management from MIT and Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT. He taught at the University of California at Berkeley where he developed some important underlying principles of programming languages: inter-module protection and lazy evaluation. He was a co-discoverer of the Knuth-Morris-Pratt string searching algorithm. For ten years he worked the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center where he was part of the team that developed the Alto System, a precursor to today’s personal computers. From 1983 to 1988 he directed the Information Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon, a joint project with IBM which developed a prototype university computing system, Andrew. He has been the principal investigator of several NSF and DARPA projects aimed at computer-mediated communication. He is a founder of the MAYA Design Group, a consulting firm specializing in interactive product design.

Speaker's Website
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jhm/