The predictability of consumer visitation patterns
Authors: Coco Krumme, Alejandro Llorente, Manuel Cebrian, Alex (“Sandy”) Pentland & Esteban Moro
Journal: Sci. Rep. 3, 1645; (2013). LINK
Abstract: 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 actually highly predictable. Notwithstanding a wide range of individual preferences, shoppers share regularities in how they visit merchant locations over time. Yet while aggregate behavior is largely predictable, the interleaving of shopping events introduces important stochastic elements at short time scales. These short- and long-scale patterns suggest a theoretical upper bound on predictability, and describe the accuracy of a Markov model in predicting a person’s next location. We incorporate population-level transition probabilities in the predictive models, and find that in many cases these improve accuracy. While our results point to the elusiveness of precise predictions about where a person will go next, they suggest the existence, at large time-scales, of regularities across the population.
Press:
- All real-world shoppers are zombies [Lifehacker]
- Animales de costumbres a la hora de la compra [ABC.es]
- Consumers almost always buy in the same shops [UC3M, Eurekalert, Phys.org, ScienceDaily]
- Compramos casi siempre en las mismas tiendas [UC3M, Puromarketing, MadridDiario]
- Consument keert altijd terug naar dezelfde winkels [Express.be]
- Shopping Happiness is Bursts of Spontaneity Within The Routine [AnalyzingMedia]
- Shoppers almost always land up at same place to buy [Truthdive]
- Creatures of habit [Beyond Madison Avenue]
- Los hábitos de los consumidores son monótonos y repetitivos [Tendencias21]
- Shopping habits predictable to a point [ABC.net.au]
- Nuestros hábitos de consumo son repetitivos y por tanto predecibles [UAM]
- Somos repetitivos y predecibles a la hora de comprar [Innovaspain]