Related papers: Patterns of Individual Shopping Behavior

We consider hundreds of thousands of individual economic transactions to ask: how predictable are consumers in their merchant visitation patterns? Our results suggest that, in the long-run, much of our seemingly elective activity is…

Consumer spending accounts for a large fraction of the US economic activity. Increasingly, consumer activity is moving to the web, where digital traces of shopping and purchases provide valuable data about consumer behavior. We analyze…

We analyze a coupled anonymized dataset collecting the mobile phone communication and bank transactions history of a large number of individuals. After mapping the social structure and introducing indicators of socioeconomic status,…

What people buy is an important aspect or view of lifestyles. Studying people's shopping patterns in different urban regions can not only provide valuable information for various commercial opportunities, but also enable a better…

A day in the life of a person involves a broad range of activities which are common across many people. Going beyond diurnal cycles, a central question is: to what extent do individuals act according to patterns shared across an entire…

Cellular phones are now offering an ubiquitous means for scientists to observe life: how people act, move and respond to external influences. They can be utilized as measurement devices of individual persons and for groups of people of the…

We analyse a coupled dataset collecting the mobile phone communications and bank transactions history of a large number of individuals living in a Latin American country. After mapping the social structure and introducing indicators of…

We present a formal model for studying fashion trends, in terms of three parameters of fashionable items: (1) their innate utility; (2) individual boredom associated with repeated usage of an item; and (3) social influences associated with…

The continuous growth of electronic commerce has stimulated great interest in studying online consumer behavior. Given the significant growth in online shopping, better understanding of customers allows better marketing strategies to be…

Can we predict top-performing products, services, or businesses by only monitoring the behavior of a small set of individuals? Although most previous studies focused on the predictive power of "hub" individuals with many social contacts,…

Consumption practices are determined by a combination of economic, social, and cultural forces. We posit that lower economic constraints leave more room to diversify consumption along cultural and social aspects in the form of omnivorous or…

To choose between two discrete goods, a consumer pays attention to only those with prices below a threshold. From these, she chooses her most preferred good. We assume consumers in a population have the same preference but may have…

We present a graph-theoretic model of consumer choice, where final decisions are shown to be influenced by information and knowledge, in the form of individual awareness, discriminating ability, and perception of market structure. Building…

We present a study of the group purchasing behavior of daily deals in Groupon and LivingSocial and introduce a predictive dynamic model of collective attention for group buying behavior. In our model, the aggregate number of purchases at a…

Zipf-like distributions characterize a wide set of phenomena in physics, biology, economics and social sciences. In human activities, Zipf-laws describe for example the frequency of words appearance in a text or the purchases types in…

We investigate how individuals form expectations about population behavior using statistical inference based on observations of their social relations. Misperceptions about others' connectedness and behavior arise from sampling bias…

Despite their importance for urban planning, traffic forecasting, and the spread of biological and mobile viruses, our understanding of the basic laws governing human motion remains limited thanks to the lack of tools to monitor the time…

In economics literature, it is accepted that all people are rational and they try to maximize their utilities as possible as they can. In addition, economic theories are formed with the assumptions not suitable to real life. For instance,…

When making decisions under risk, people often exhibit behaviors that classical economic theories cannot explain. Newer models that attempt to account for these irrational behaviors often lack neuroscience bases and require the introduction…

It is commonly believed that patterns of social ties affect individuals' economic status. Here, we translate this concept into an operational definition at the network level, which allows us to infer the economic wellbeing of individuals…