English

The Pitman-Yor process and an empirical study of choice behavior

Physics and Society 2018-02-14 v2 Social and Information Networks Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability

Abstract

This study discusses choice behavior using a voting model in which voters can obtain information from a finite number of previous rr voters. Voters vote for a candidate with a probability proportional to the previous vote ratio, which is visible to the voters. We obtain the Pitman sampling formula as the equilibrium distribution of rr votes. We present the model as a process of posting on a bulletin board system, 2ch.net, where users can choose one of many threads to create a post. We explore how this choice depends on the last rr posts and the distribution of these last rr posts across threads. We conclude that the posting process is described by our voting model with analog herders for a small rr, which might correspond to the time horizon of users' responses.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1707.07466,
  title  = {The Pitman-Yor process and an empirical study of choice behavior},
  author = {Masato Hisakado and Fumiaki Sano and Shintaro Mori},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.07466},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

29 pages,11 figures