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Correlations and dynamics of consumption patterns in social-economic networks

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Abstract

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 socioeconomic status, demographic features, and purchasing habits of individuals, we show that typical consumption patterns are strongly correlated with identified socioeconomic classes leading to patterns of stratification in the social structure. In addition, we measure correlations between merchant categories and introduce a correlation network, which emerges with a meaningful community structure. We detect multivariate relations between merchant categories and show correlations in purchasing habits of individuals. Finally, by analysing individual consumption histories, we detect dynamical patterns in purchase behaviour and their correlations with the socioeconomic status, demographic characters and the egocentric social network of individuals. Our work provides novel and detailed insight into the relations between social and consuming behaviour with potential applications in resource allocation, marketing, and recommendation system design.

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Notes

  1. Note that the matching, data hashing, and anonymisation procedure was carried out through direct communication between the two providers (bank and mobile provider) without the involvement of the scientific partner. After this procedure, only anonymised hashed IDs were shared disallowing the direct identification of individuals in any of the datasets.

  2. Note that in our social class definition the cumulative AMP is equal for each group and this way each group represents the same economic potential as a whole. Values shown in Fig. 2b assign the total purchase of classes. Another strategy would be to calculate per capita measures, which in turn would be strongly dominated by values associated with the richest class, hiding any meaningful information about other classes.

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Acknowledgements

We thank M. Fixman for assistance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Univ Lyon, ENS de Lyon, INRIA, CNRS, UMR 5668, IXXI, 69364, Lyon, France

    Yannick Leo, Márton Karsai & Eric Fleury

  2. Grandata Labs, 550 15th Street, San Francisco, California, 94103, USA

    Carlos Sarraute

Authors
  1. Yannick Leo
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  2. Márton Karsai
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  3. Carlos Sarraute
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  4. Eric Fleury
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Márton Karsai.

Additional information

We acknowledge the support from the SticAmSud UCOOL project, INRIA, and the SoSweet (ANR-15-CE38-0011-01) and CODDDE (ANR-13-CORD-0017-01) ANR projects.

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Leo, Y., Karsai, M., Sarraute, C. et al. Correlations and dynamics of consumption patterns in social-economic networks. Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. 8, 9 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-018-0486-1

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