Comments on: Buying behavior is driven by complex social behaviors

By: francois

francois — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 13:47:30 +0000

Gordon – I wrote about the book in which they describe reciprocity as a reflex here:
http://www.emergencemarketing.com/2008/10/21/the-importance-of-reciprocity-in-ultrasocial-societies/

By: Gordon Rae

Gordon Rae — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 10:01:01 +0000

I’m inclined to agree with Paula, but I’d like to know where you got the idea that social behaviour is determined by hardwired reflexes. For a good read on social behaviour, check out Mark Earls’ book ‘Herd’.

By: scorpfromhell

scorpfromhell — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 19:40:02 +0000

Nice thought provoking article!

I for one am not interested in predicting individual buying behavior right now, though it is a worthy & lofty goal in deed.

I will be gratified if I can merely influence communities’ buying behavior based on the complex social behavior patterns.

By: francois

francois — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:07:48 +0000

@Paula – Thanks for commenting on my post. One of the core points I was trying to make is that you can actually not predict buying behavior based on individual behavioral modeling – whether economic or social. I believe that the buying process is so dependent on the behavior of others in the system that we need something more akin to complex system’s modeling…but now the engineer in me is coming out

By: Rotkapchen

Rotkapchen — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 15:38:48 +0000

Social is a context. The core influencer here is personal economics — the dynamic collection of rules we apply to make decisions: our personal rationale.

In the realm of economic thinking, ALL behavior is rational — it is based on our rationale. The most relevant thing we do as evaluators is to assess what the rationale might be and what the corresponding influencers are — based on the elasticity of those influencers.

It’s all economics.