IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0120039.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Computational Models of Consumer Confidence from Large-Scale Online Attention Data: Crowd-Sourcing Econometrics

Author

Listed:
  • Xianlei Dong
  • Johan Bollen

Abstract

Economies are instances of complex socio-technical systems that are shaped by the interactions of large numbers of individuals. The individual behavior and decision-making of consumer agents is determined by complex psychological dynamics that include their own assessment of present and future economic conditions as well as those of others, potentially leading to feedback loops that affect the macroscopic state of the economic system. We propose that the large-scale interactions of a nation's citizens with its online resources can reveal the complex dynamics of their collective psychology, including their assessment of future system states. Here we introduce a behavioral index of Chinese Consumer Confidence (C3I) that computationally relates large-scale online search behavior recorded by Google Trends data to the macroscopic variable of consumer confidence. Our results indicate that such computational indices may reveal the components and complex dynamics of consumer psychology as a collective socio-economic phenomenon, potentially leading to improved and more refined economic forecasting.

Suggested Citation

  • Xianlei Dong & Johan Bollen, 2015. "Computational Models of Consumer Confidence from Large-Scale Online Attention Data: Crowd-Sourcing Econometrics," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(3), pages 1-18, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0120039
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0120039
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0120039
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0120039&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0120039?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. David Garcia & Claudio Juan Tessone & Pavlin Mavrodiev & Nicolas Perony, 2014. "The digital traces of bubbles: feedback cycles between socio-economic signals in the Bitcoin economy," Papers 1408.1494, arXiv.org.
    2. Ilaria Bordino & Stefano Battiston & Guido Caldarelli & Matthieu Cristelli & Antti Ukkonen & Ingmar Weber, 2012. "Web Search Queries Can Predict Stock Market Volumes," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 7(7), pages 1-17, July.
    3. King, Gary & Roberts, Margaret E., 2015. "How Robust Standard Errors Expose Methodological Problems They Do Not Fix, and What to Do About It," Political Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 23(2), pages 159-179, April.
    4. Barberis, Nicholas & Shleifer, Andrei & Vishny, Robert, 1998. "A model of investor sentiment," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 49(3), pages 307-343, September.
    5. White, Halbert, 1980. "A Heteroskedasticity-Consistent Covariance Matrix Estimator and a Direct Test for Heteroskedasticity," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 48(4), pages 817-838, May.
    6. David Garcia & Claudio Tessone & Pavlin Mavrodiev & Nicolas Perony, "undated". "The digital traces of bubbles: feedback cycles between socio-economic signals in the Bitcoin economy," Working Papers ETH-RC-14-001, ETH Zurich, Chair of Systems Design.
    7. Granger, C W J, 1969. "Investigating Causal Relations by Econometric Models and Cross-Spectral Methods," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 37(3), pages 424-438, July.
    8. Kietzmann, Jan H. & Hermkens, Kristopher & McCarthy, Ian P. & Silvestre, Bruno S., 2011. "Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media," Business Horizons, Elsevier, vol. 54(3), pages 241-251, May.
    9. Sims, Christopher A, 1980. "Macroeconomics and Reality," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 48(1), pages 1-48, January.
    10. Granger, C. W. J. & Newbold, P., 1974. "Spurious regressions in econometrics," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 2(2), pages 111-120, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Nepp, Alexander & Okhrin, Ostap & Egorova, Julia & Dzhuraeva, Zarnigor & Zykov, Alexander, 2022. "What threatens stock markets more - The coronavirus or the hype around it?," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 78(C), pages 519-539.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Adrian C. Darnell, 1994. "A Dictionary Of Econometrics," Books, Edward Elgar Publishing, number 118, March.
    2. Sha Wang & Jean-Philippe Vergne, 2017. "Buzz Factor or Innovation Potential: What Explains Cryptocurrencies’ Returns?," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(1), pages 1-17, January.
    3. Franklin Edwards & Xin Zhang, 1998. "Mutual Funds and Stock and Bond Market Stability," Journal of Financial Services Research, Springer;Western Finance Association, vol. 13(3), pages 257-282, June.
    4. Damian Zięba & Katarzyna Śledziewska, 2018. "Are demand shocks in Bitcoin contagious?," Working Papers 2018-17, Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw.
    5. Andreas Brunhart, 2013. "Der Klein(st)staat Liechtenstein und seine grossen Nachbarländer: Eine wachstums- und konjunkturanalytische Gegenüberstellung," Arbeitspapiere 44, Liechtenstein-Institut.
    6. M.T. Alguacil & V. Orts, "undated". "A multivariate cointegrated model testing for temporal causality between exports and outward FDI: The Spanish case," Studies on the Spanish Economy 50, FEDEA.
    7. Ericsson, Neil R & Hendry, David F & Mizon, Grayham E, 1998. "Exogeneity, Cointegration, and Economic Policy Analysis," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 16(4), pages 370-387, October.
    8. Geweke, J. & Joel Horowitz & Pesaran, M.H., 2006. "Econometrics: A Bird’s Eye View," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 0655, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    9. de Meulemeester, Jean-Luc & Rochat, Denis, 1995. "A causality analysis of the link between higher education and economic development," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 14(4), pages 351-361, December.
    10. Pauwels, Koen & Aksehirli, Zeynep & Lackman, Andrew, 2016. "Like the ad or the brand? Marketing stimulates different electronic word-of-mouth content to drive online and offline performance," International Journal of Research in Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 33(3), pages 639-655.
    11. David Garcia & Frank Schweitzer, 2015. "Social signals and algorithmic trading of Bitcoin," Papers 1506.01513, arXiv.org, revised Sep 2015.
    12. Khalid Khan & Jiluo Sun & Sinem Derindere Koseoglu & Ashfaq U. Rehman, 2021. "Revisiting Bitcoin Price Behavior Under Global Economic Uncertainty," SAGE Open, , vol. 11(3), pages 21582440211, August.
    13. Kalaitzi, Athanasia Stylianou & Chamberlain, Trevor William, 2021. "The validity of the export-led growth hypothesis: some evidence from the GCC," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 106586, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    14. David I. Stern, 2011. "From Correlation to Granger Causality," Crawford School Research Papers 1113, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University.
    15. Ji, Qiang & Bouri, Elie & Gupta, Rangan & Roubaud, David, 2018. "Network causality structures among Bitcoin and other financial assets: A directed acyclic graph approach," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 70(C), pages 203-213.
    16. Ongono, Patrice, 2009. "Consommation d'énergie et performances économiques au Cameroun [Energy consumption and economic performance in Cameroon]," MPRA Paper 23525, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    17. Broersma, L., 1991. "The relation between unemployment and interest rate : application of an ARX approach," Serie Research Memoranda 0057, VU University Amsterdam, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Econometrics.
    18. David Greasley & Les Oxley, 2010. "Cliometrics And Time Series Econometrics: Some Theory And Applications," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 24(5), pages 970-1042, December.
    19. Yıldırım, Ertugrul & Sukruoglu, Deniz & Aslan, Alper, 2014. "Energy consumption and economic growth in the next 11 countries: The bootstrapped autoregressive metric causality approach," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 44(C), pages 14-21.
    20. Sebastian Stolorz, 2005. "Perceived Welfare Effects of Current Account Deficit - Evidence from American Economy 1967-2005," International Trade 0512013, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0120039. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.