CLIP colloquium: Konstantinos Pelechrinis (U of Pittsburgh)

Civiconomics: Urban Economy in the Era of Social Media and Shared Economy

Abstract

Cities have been long thought as the paramount instrument of innovation and wealth creation. This has led to the unprecedented levels of urbanization that we have witnessed during the last decade. In the era of mobile, pervasive and social computing there has been a paradigm shift on the way that dwellers, local businesses and local governments interact with each other in order to achieve their goals. In this talk I will focus on two seemingly different problems, which however fill in different parts of the puzzle of modern urban economy.

In the first part of the talk I will focus on the use of social computing, and in particular location-based social media, for the growth of local businesses. Traditional yellow pages websites have now moved to mobile platforms, giving the opportunity to local businesses and potential, near-by, customers to connect. These platforms can offer an affordable advertisement channel to local businesses. One of the mechanisms offered by location-based social media allows businesses to provide special offers to their customers that connect through the platform. We collect a large time-series dataset from approximately 14 million venues of a major online social network and analyze the performance of such campaigns using randomization techniques and (non-parametric) hypothesis testing with statistical bootstrapping. Our main finding indicates that promotions through these platforms do not alter the probability of observing an increase in the daily check-ins to a venue, while the underlying standardized effect size changes only slightly.

Then I will move on to examine the impact of the shared economy in the urban ecosystem. We focus on shared mobility and in particular, the shared bike systems that have been rapidly adopted in many US cities. Our objective is to quantify their value using evidence from the real-estate market in the city of Pittsburgh. We use quasi-experimental techniques and find that the shared bike system leads to an increase in the housing prices. This opens up many different questions to be examined on the way that these systems can benefit local economy and businesses. However, we also bring into the light potential negative consequences (i.e., gentrification) and discuss two public policies that can exploit the impact of the system for the benefit of both the local government as well as the city dwellers.

References:

[1] K. Zhang, K. Pelechrinis, T. Lappas, “Analyzing and Modeling Special Offer Campaigns in Location Based Social Networks”, in AAAI ICWSM, 2015.

[2] K. Pelechrinis, M. Kokkodis, T. Lappas, “On the Value of Shared Bike Systems in Urban Environments: Evidence from the Real Estate Market”, Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2692802

[3] K. Zhang, K. Pelechrinis, "Do Street Fairs Boost Local Businesses? A Quasi-Experimental Analysis Using Social Network Data", in ECML/PKDD 2016

Bio

Konstantinos Pelechrinis is an Associate Professor at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. He received his PhD from the Computer Science department of University of California, Riverside, in 2010. His research interests include network science and he is involved in understanding the social, spatial, temporal and network dynamics of the behavior of people, developing models and algorithms for intelligent urban services. Of particular interest to him are studies related with urban economy and transportation. He is a recipient of the Army Research Office Young Investigator (2015) for his work on composite networks.