Correlations and dynamics of consumption patterns in social-economic networks

TL;DR

This study analyzes mobile and banking data to reveal how consumption patterns are linked to social and economic structures, uncovering stratification, community structures, and behavioral dynamics with implications for marketing and resource management.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis linking consumption, social networks, and socioeconomic status, revealing new patterns of stratification and behavioral correlations.

Findings

Consumption patterns are strongly correlated with socioeconomic classes.

A meaningful community structure emerges in merchant category correlations.

Dynamical purchase behaviors relate to social and demographic factors.

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.