Competing for attention in knowledge markets: Electronic document dissemination in a management consulting company

The relatively recent explosion of information available in electronic form s makes attention, rather than information, the scarce resource in organiza tions. In this paper, we theorize about how suppliers of electronic informa tion compete for this resource and use data on document database use in a m anagement consulting company to show that document suppliers that occupied a crowded segment of the firm's internal knowledge market gained less atten tion from employees (measured as monthly use of their database) but were ab le to combat this negative competitive effect by being selective and concen trated in their document supply. This result reveals a paradox of informati on supply in competitive information markets: the less information a suppli er offered, the more it was used, because the supplier developed a reputati on for quality and focus. We suggest that this view of competition for atte ntion can also be applied to the competition among Web sites in external in formation markets.