The Lifecycles of Apps in a Social Ecosystem

Apps are emerging as an important form of on-line content, and they combine aspects of Web usage in interesting ways --- they exhibit a rich temporal structure of user adoption and long-term engagement, and they exist in a broader social ecosystem that helps drive these patterns of adoption and engagement. It has been difficult, however, to study apps in their natural setting since this requires a simultaneous analysis of a large set of popular apps and the underlying social network they inhabit. In this work we address this challenge through an analysis of the collection of apps on Facebook Login, developing a novel framework for analyzing both temporal and social properties. At the temporal level, we develop a retention model that represents a user's tendency to return to an app using a very small parameter set. At the social level, we organize the space of apps along two fundamental axes --- popularity and sociality --- and we show how a user's probability of adopting an app depends both on properties of the local network structure and on the match between the user's attributes, his or her friends' attributes, and the dominant attributes within the app's user population. We also develop models that show the importance of different feature sets with strong performance in predicting app success.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, 3 tables, International World Wide Web Conferenc

Secularization in Europe: religious change between and within birth cohorts

There is ample evidence of religious decline in Western Europe but no general consensus on the situation in the East. Analysis of three waves of the European Values Study (from 1990, 1999 and 2008) adds to the evidence base on secularization across the continent. As expected, older people in most countries, even in Central and Eastern Europe (though not in parts of the former Yugoslavia), seem to be more religious than the rest of the population. More surprisingly, the data suggest that religiosity increased in Northern and Southern as well as Eastern Europe during the 1990s. It is far from clear that these apparent rises are genuine. It still seems fair to say that society is changing religiously not because individuals are changing, but rather because old people are gradually replaced by younger people with different characteristics. Much remains to be understood, though, about why recent generations are different. Parents may be partly responsible, by giving children more control over their own lives. The composition of society has changed, but so has the context in which people are raised. Young people acquire different values and face new conditions. Which factors are most important remains to be determined

Entrepreneurship, Entry and Exit in Creative Industries: an explorative Survey

Series: Creative Industries in Vienna: Development, Dynamics and Potential

Beyond the shadows of utility: evolutionary consumer theory and the rise of modern tourism

A generic feature of advanced economic development is the rapid emergence of what Konrad Lorenz dubbed the ‘Pleasure Economy’ – the rising percentage of household income spent on leisure consumption (Lorenz 1970). To explain such long run shifts in consumption, it is necessary to do away with the shadow that modern utility theory casts on the nature of consumer tastes and to investigate how these have indeed evolved in the face of a continuously expanding and increasingly heterogeneous set of consumption opportunities. Starting with the basic conjecture that the expansion of consumption is shaped by a set of biologically evolved behavioral predispositions which are inherent in the consumer’s genetic endowment (Witt 2001), we examine the historical emergence of certain types of tourism to show how the interplay between these ‘wants’ and the act of recreational travel may account for the explosive growth of modern tourism activity

Diffusion processes in demographic transitions: a prospect on using multi agent simulation to explore the role of cognitive strategies and social interactions

Multi agent simulation (MAS) is a tool that can be used to explore the dynamics of different systems. Considering that many demographic phenomena have roots in individual choice behaviour and social interactions it is important that this behaviour is being translated in agent rules. Several behaviour theories are relevant in this context, and hence there is a necessity of using a meta-theory of behaviour as a framework for the development of agent rules. The consumat approach provides a basis for such a framework, as is demonstrated with a discussion of modelling the diffusion of contraceptives. These diffusion processes are strongly influenced by social processes and cognitive strategies. Different possible research lines are discussed which might be addressed with a multi-agent approach like the consumats.

Maximum Entropy Models of Shortest Path and Outbreak Distributions in Networks

Properties of networks are often characterized in terms of features such as node degree distributions, average path lengths, diameters, or clustering coefficients. Here, we study shortest path length distributions. On the one hand, average as well as maximum distances can be determined therefrom; on the other hand, they are closely related to the dynamics of network spreading processes. Because of the combinatorial nature of networks, we apply maximum entropy arguments to derive a general, physically plausible model. In particular, we establish the generalized Gamma distribution as a continuous characterization of shortest path length histograms of networks or arbitrary topology. Experimental evaluations corroborate our theoretical results

The Symbiotic Relationship Between Information Retrieval and Informetrics

Informetrics and information retrieval (IR) represent fundamental areas of study within information science. Historically, researchers have not fully capitalized on the potential research synergies that exist between these two areas. Data sources used in traditional informetrics studies have their analogues in IR, with similar types of empirical regularities found in IR system content and use. Methods for data collection and analysis used in informetrics can help to inform IR system development and evaluation. Areas of application have included automatic indexing, index term weighting and understanding user query and session patterns through the quantitative analysis of user transaction logs. Similarly, developments in database technology have made the study of informetric phenomena less cumbersome, and recent innovations used in IR research, such as language models and ranking algorithms, provide new tools that may be applied to research problems of interest to informetricians. Building on the author’s previous work (Wolfram 2003), this paper reviews a sample of relevant literature published primarily since 2000 to highlight how each area of study may help to inform and benefit the other