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. © 2010 IEEE.