Cities through the Prism of People's Spending Behavior.

ABSTRACT: Scientific studies of society increasingly rely on digital traces produced by various aspects of human activity. In this paper, we exploit a relatively unexplored source of data-anonymized records of bank card transactions collected in Spain by a big European bank, and propose a new classification scheme of cities based on the economic behavior of their residents. First, we study how individual spending behavior is qualitatively and quantitatively affected by various factors such as customer's age, gender, and size of his/her home city. We show that, similar to other socioeconomic urban quantities, individual spending activity exhibits a statistically significant superlinear scaling with city size. With respect to the general trends, we quantify the distinctive signature of each city in te

SUBMITTER: Sobolevsky S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4743849 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature