jacie's chapter 4

I have been interested in utilities for a while, but in chapter 4 I found Attribute Theory to be rather interesting. So let me raise several inquiries here regarding Attribute Theory and news media.

I see news consumption to be a combination of habit forming and attributes provided by the product. Of course were this statement to be, my vague and nonscientific assumption would be the content and information offered by different media company to be rather similar, if not identical. By drawing a table of news consumption, I put habit or non-habit in the first column and in the first row I put the utilities consumer obtains from consuming the product is either from the product itself or from the attributes provided by the product. Thus we have four kinds of combination here.

	utilities from the product itself	utilities from attributes provided by the product
habit	A	B
nonhabit	C	D

I do agree with Nan that news consumption is built as a habit, meaning users have one to several news sources that they usually get their news from. In this case, we focus on cell A and B in the table above (of course we can discuss about it if you think accessing news media is not a habit).

What I see news consumption fits Attribute Theory is the utility news consumers get is not from the product (the media itself), but is from the attributes provided by the products, making the demand for the product (i.e.: a print newspaper) a derived demand. I argue the attributes are the information and opinion pieces in the news media. Take a print newspaper again for example, after a reader read the newspaper once, obtained the utility from the information (which is the attribute), the media itself does not have too much value left, as well as a second copy of the day's newspaper does not have much more value than the first copy (unless the paper is wrapping my lunch today).

I see online news to be the same case, even though we do not pay for it. The product itself might be the bit and bytes in our computer's short memory or in our computer's temp storage, but the attributes are still the information and the opinion. Once we read/watch/listened to it all, we got it all. It is not like I just had a piece of cheese cake before I started writing this response and I want another piece now.