An experimental study of consumption behaviors in telecom social networks

Abstract

Customers' social ties have played a crucial role in influencing their consumption behaviors. Generally, users can influence others' consumption behaviors via word-of-mouth.But in some special industry such as telecom, some kinds of indirect influences also exist between users and some applications such as social recommendation have been researched on the basis of these influences. In order to explore such influences, this paper selects some attributes to outline the users' consumption behaviors and explores the relationship of the social ties and the behaviors via some analysis experiments.The results show that (1) the social tie attributes have strong correlations with users' consumption behaviors similarity; (2) as the strength of the telecom social ties improve, the similarity value of the users' value-added services using behaviors get greater but (3) the communication behaviors don't have a strong correlation with the strength of telecom social ties.

Recommendations based on Social Relationships in Mobile Services

“…Pickard et al (2010) investigated the trust in information resources in Web environments and used their achievements in investment industry. Zhu et al (2010) gave a detailed interpretation on the question of how consumption behaviors are influenced by social connections, and two important hypotheses were brought up: (i) two users with close social relationships have similar consumption preferences and (ii) the closer their social relationships are, the higher the similarity of their behaviors, and validated in statistical significance. These two hypotheses stated this question clearly, and this research gave a rigorous data experiment to validate the hypotheses.…”

“…The CF algorithm is based on the following assumptions: (i) users' preferences can be expressed and users can be classified in accordance with their preferences and (ii) users are more inclined to adopt products recommended by those with similar preferences. With consideration of these two assumptions, this paper brings up several complementary judgments specific to telecom services: (i) users are more likely to adopt products recommended by their acquaintances; (ii) two users with close social relationships have similar consumption preferences; and (iii) the closer their social relationships are, the higher the similarity of their behaviors (Zhu et al, 2010).…”

“…Second, the telecom users are connected through voice calls and other communication services. An interesting research by Zhu et al () proves the correlation of the social relationships between telecom users and their behaviors; their conclusions are of value to our research. The recommendation systems in the telecom industry should effectively reduce the scarcity of the user–product matrix, by taking social relationships between users into account to facilitate the recommendation processes.…”