An elementary social information foraging model
Peter L. T. Pirolli · 2009
User interfaces and information systems have become increasingly social in recent years, aimed at supporting the decentralized, cooperative production and use of content. A theory that predicts the impact of interface and interaction designs on such factors as participation rates and knowledge discovery is likely to be useful. This paper reviews a variety of observed phenomena in social information foraging and sketches a framework extending Information Foraging Theory towards making predictions about the effects of diversity, interference, and cost-of-effort on performance time, participation rates, and utility of discoveries.