Modelling Interaction with Economic Models of Search

Understanding how people interact when searching is cen-tral to the study of Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR). Most of the prior work has either been conceptual, obser-vational or empirical. While this has led to numerous in-sights and findings regarding the interaction between users and systems, the theory has lagged behind. In this paper, we extend the recently proposed search economic theory to make the model more realistic. We then derive eight inter-action based hypotheses regarding search behaviour. To val-idate the model, we explore whether the search behaviour of thirty-six participants from a lab based study is consistent with the theory. Our analysis shows that observed search behaviours are in line with predicted search behaviours and that it is possible to provide credible explanations for such behaviours. This work describes a concise and compact rep-resentation of search behaviour providing a strong theoreti-cal basis for future IIR research