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Mobility is undergoing dramatic transformations. Especially in the context of urban areas, several significant changes are underway, driven by both new mobility needs and environmental concerns. The most mature one, which still is…
With the aim to contribute to humanitarian response to disasters and violent events, scientists have proposed the development of analytical tools that could identify emergency events in real-time, using mobile phone data. The assumption is…
Determining the poverty levels of various regions throughout the world is crucial in identifying interventions for poverty reduction initiatives and directing resources fairly. However, reliable data on global economic livelihoods is hard…
We study the interaction between network effects and external incentives on file sharing behavior in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. Many current or envisioned P2P networks reward individuals for sharing files, via financial incentives or…
South Africa's disability grants program is tied to its HIV/AIDS recovery program, such that individuals who are ill enough may qualify. Qualification is historically tied to a CD4 count of 200 cells/mm3, which improve when a person adheres…
Rural connectivity is widely research topic for several years. In India, around 70% of the population have poor or no connectivity to access digital services. Different solutions are being tested and trialled around the world, especially in…
The value of mobile apps is traditionally measured by metrics such as the number of downloads, installations, or user ratings. A problem with these measures is that they reflect actual usage at most indirectly. Indeed, analytic companies…
Global and regional integration has grown significantly in recent decades, boosting intra-African trade and positively impacting national economies through trade diversification and sustainable development. However, existing measures of…
Surveys are critical inputs for research and policy, yet, enumerating a sampling frame is logistically infeasible or financially nonviable in many circumstances, such as during pandemics, natural disasters, or armed conflict. Respondent…
Social media has had a significant impact on our individual lives, including our behavior regarding the purchasing of daily products. This study investigates the factors influencing Omani nationals' intentions to obtain products via social…
In the West African country of Ghana, depression is a significant issue affecting a large number of women. Despite its importance, the issue received insufficient attention during the COVID-19 pandemic. In developed countries, mobile phones…
Sampling hidden populations is particularly challenging using standard sampling methods mainly because of the lack of a sampling frame. Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) is an alternative methodology that exploits the social contacts between…
We develop a model where currency issuers provide liquidity, while users in a trade network choose currency usage for trade settlement. We identify a feedback mechanism where a user's currency preference spillovers to others and increases…
We consider the assignment problem, where $n$ agents have to be matched to $n$ items. Each agent has a preference order over the items. In the serial dictatorship (SD) mechanism the agents act in a particular order and pick their most…
Motivated by applications such as viral marketing, the problem of influence maximization (IM) has been extensively studied in the literature. The goal is to select a small number of users to adopt an item such that it results in a large…
Digital platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and Amazon Mechanical Turk have transformed the study of human behavior and provided access to new subject pools for academic research. In our study, we leverage the Facebook…
This study provides the first confirmation that individual employment status can be predicted from standard mobile phone network logs externally validated with household survey data. Individual welfare and households vulnerability to shocks…
Financial inclusion is a longstanding concern across underdeveloped communities, particularly for women. However, there are limited data-driven measures to first quantitatively identify such concerns and second to inform policies. In this…
Small farms contribute to a large share of the productive land in developing countries. In regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, where 80\% of farms are small (under 2 ha in size), the task of mapping smallholder cropland is an important part…
Respondent driven sampling (RDS) is a method often used to estimate population properties (e.g. sexual risk behavior) in hard-to-reach populations. It combines an effective modified snowball sampling methodology with an estimation procedure…