Power law signature of media exposure in human response waiting time distributions
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Crane-2010-Power law signature.pdf
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Author(s)
Crane, Riley
Schweitzer, Frank
Sornette, Didier
Date Issued
May 2010
Journal
Physical Review E
Publisher
American Physical Society
Citation
Crane, Riley, Frank Schweitzer, and Didier Sornette. "Power law signature of media exposure in human response waiting time distributions." Physical Review E 81.5 (2010): 056101. © 2010 The American Physical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We study the humanitarian response to the destruction brought by the tsunami generated by the Sumatra earthquake of December 26, 2004, as measured by donations, and find that it decays in time as a power law ∼1/tα with α=2.5±0.1. This behavior is suggested to be the rare outcome of a priority queuing process in which individuals execute tasks at a rate slightly faster than the rate at which new tasks arise. We believe this to be an empirical evidence documenting the recently predicted [G. Grinstein and R. Linsker, Phys. Rev. E 77, 012101 (2008)] regime, and provide additional independent evidence that suggests that this “highly attentive regime” arises as a result of the intense focus placed on this donation “task” by the media.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.81.056101
