Paper Info
Title
Social Bridges in Urban Purchase Behavior.
Abstract
The understanding and modeling of human purchase behavior in city environment can have important implications in the study of urban economy and in the design and organization of cities. In this article, we study human purchase behavior at the community level and argue that people who live in different communities but work at close-by locations could act as “social bridges” between the respective communities and that they are correlated with similarity in community purchase behavior. We provide empirical evidence by studying millions of credit card transaction records for tens of thousands of individuals in a city environment during a period of three months. More specifically, we show that the number of social bridges between communities is a much stronger indicator of similarity in their purchase behavior than traditionally considered factors such as income and sociodemographic variables. Our findings also suggest that such an effect varies across different merchant categories, that the presence of female customers in social bridges is a stronger indicator compared to that of their male counterparts, and that there seems to be a geographical constraint for this effect, all of which may have implications in the studies of urban economy and data-driven urban planning.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1145/3149409
ACM TIST
Keywords
Field
DocType
Purchase behavior, credit card transaction, physical environment, social bridge
Urban economics,Empirical evidence,Computer science,Credit card,Urban planning,Artificial intelligence,Database transaction,Machine learning,Marketing,City environment
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
9
3
2157-6904
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.42
23
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xiaowen Dong124922.07
Yoshihiko Suhara23912.01
Burçin Bozkaya3244.71
Vivek K. Singh435037.52
Bruno Lepri598172.52
Alex Pentland6180064853.13