Buying what people like you buy: Personality Homophily and Well-being in Consumer Behaviour

Recommender systems and personalised marketing algorithms now proliferate our daily lives, harnessing similarity to other profiles to guide our purchasing decisions. Recent research indicates that this personalisation can be good for our well-being, as spending in a way that fits our personality, can engender happiness. Less well-understood however, is the impact personality homophily (where people prefer to connect with others of similar personalities) has on consumer well-being. In this study, we investigate whether individuals who exhibit homophily in their consumption patterns, by buying what others of a similar personality buy, report higher well-being. We analyse over 12,000 personality questionnaires measuring the Big Five and well-being, linked to 3 million loyalty card transaction logs from a multi-national retailer. Personality homophily, or `buying what people like you buy', is quantified by introducing a novel metric, Personality Alignment (PA). Findings show that PA on Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism positively predicts well-being, and that effects are strongest for those higher in Neuroticism. Given the rise of algorithm-assisted decision making, along with growing attention to ethical-AI, these results show that personality homophily can be leveraged in the design of future personalised marketing mechanisms, not just for greater sales, but also customer’s long term well-being

Some Good Ideas from the Disciplinary Commons

In this paper, we describe the Disciplinary Commons project and identify some practical ideas which address central issues for teaching and learning of introductory programming that have emerged from it

Laboratory Exams in First Programming

ABSTRAC

Genomic reconstruction of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in England

AbstractThe evolution of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus leads to new variants that warrant timely epidemiological characterization. Here we use the dense genomic surveillance data generated by the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium to reconstruct the dynamics of 71 different lineages in each of 315 English local authorities between September 2020 and June 2021. This analysis reveals a series of subepidemics that peaked in early autumn 2020, followed by a jump in transmissibility of the B.1.1.7/Alpha lineage. The Alpha variant grew when other lineages declined during the second national lockdown and regionally tiered restrictions between November and December 2020. A third more stringent national lockdown suppressed the Alpha variant and eliminated nearly all other lineages in early 2021. Yet a series of variants (most of which contained the spike E484K mutation) defied these trends and persisted at moderately increasing proportions. However, by accounting for sustained introductions, we found that the transmissibility of these variants is unlikely to have exceeded the transmissibility of the Alpha variant. Finally, B.1.617.2/Delta was repeatedly introduced in England and grew rapidly in early summer 2021, constituting approximately 98% of sampled SARS-CoV-2 genomes on 26 June 2021.</jats:p