The applications of loyalty card data for social science

Large-scale consumer datasets have become increasingly abundant in recent years and many have turned their attention to harnessing these for insights within the social sciences. Whilst commercial organisations have been quick to recognise the benefits of these data as a source of competitive advantage, their emergence has been met with contention in research due to the epistemological, methodological and ethical challenges they present. These issues have seldom been addressed, primarily due to these data being hard to obtain outside of the commercial settings in which they are often generated. This thesis presents an exploration of a unique loyalty card dataset obtained from one of the most prominent UK high street retailers, and thus an opportunity to study the dynamics, potentialities and limitations when applying such data in a research context. The predominant aims of this work were to firstly, address issues of uncertainty surrounding novel consumer datasets by quantifying their inherent representation and data quality issues and secondly, to explore the extent to which we may enrich our current knowledge of spatiotemporal population processes through the analysis of consumer activity patterns. Our current understanding of such dynamics has been limited by the data-scarce era, yet loyalty card data provide individual level, georeferenced population data that are high in velocity. This provided a framework for understanding more detailed interactions between people and places, and what these might indicate for both consumption behaviours and wider societal phenomena. This work endeavoured to provide a substantive contribution to the integration of consumer datasets in social science research, by outlining pragmatic steps to ensure novel data sources can be fit for purpose, and to population geography research, by exploring the extent to which we may utilise spatiotemporal consumption activities to make broad inferences about the general population

Methods and Methodology: COMP6049

Slides and exercises for class on methods and methodology to web science masters. Explores inter-disciplinarity and disciplinary difference

E-commerce, Warehousing and Distribution Facilities in California: A Dynamic Landscape and the Impacts on Disadvantaged Communities

This work addresses the distribution of warehouses and distribution centers (W&DCs) influenced by e-commerce, through spatial analysis and econometric modelling. Specifically, this work analyzes the concentration of W&DCs in various metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) in California between 1989 and 2016-18; and studies the spatial relationships between W&DC distribution and other demographic and environmental factors through econometric modeling techniques. The work conducts analyses to uncover common trends in W&DC distribution. The analyses used aggregate establishment, employment, and other socio-economic information, complemented with transportation related variables. The results: 1) confirm that the weighted geometric centers of W&DCs have shifted slightly towards city central areas in all five MPOs; 2) W&DCs show a non-decreasing trend between 2008 and 2016; and 3) areas with more serious environmental problems are more likely to have W&DCs. A disaggregate analyses of properties sold and leased in one of the study regions shows a trend where businesses are buying or leasing smaller facilities, closer to the core of consumer demand. Among other factors, the growth of e-commerce sales, and expedited delivery services, which require proximity to the customers, may explain these trends. The study results provide insights for planners and policy decision makers, and will be of interest to practitioners, public and private entities, and academia. Caltrans, MPOs, and affiliated institutions of the National Center for Sustainable Transportation will directly benefit from the results as they want to avoid equity issues brought by the fast development of e-commerce, and its potential impact on W&DC distribution

Spatial Architecture of the Production Networks in Southeast Asia

The main purpose of this paper is to provide empirical evidence on the inter-firm production networks in Southeast Asian developing economies. Using firm-level data obtained from a questionnaire survey of manufacturing firms in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam in 2008, this paper presents the regional distribution of main customers and suppliers and their geographical proximity. Firm-level capabilities and transaction costs associated with specific inter-firm relationships would influence the distances between customers and suppliers. Ordered logistic estimations are carried out to examine factors affecting the spatial architecture of the production networks in the region.