Can we predict top-performing products, services, or businesses by only monitoring the behavior of a small set of individuals? Although most previous studies focused on the predictive power of "hub" individuals with many social contacts, which sources of customer behavioral data are needed to address this question remains unclear, mostly due to the scarcity of available datasets that simultaneously capture individuals' purchasing patterns and social interactions. Here, we address this question in a unique, large-scale dataset that combines individuals' credit-card purchasing history with their social and mobility traits across an entire nation. Surprisingly, we find that the purchasing history alone enables the detection of small sets of ``discoverers" whose early purchases offer reliable success predictions for the brick-and-mortar stores they visit. In contrast with the assumptions by most existing studies on word-of-mouth processes, the hubs selected by social network centrality are not consistently predictive of success. Our findings show that companies and organizations with access to large-scale purchasing data can detect the discoverers and leverage their behavior to anticipate market trends, without the need for social network data.

中文翻译：

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少数人的智慧：从个人行为预测集体成功

我们能否仅通过监控一小部分人的行为来预测表现最佳的产品、服务或业务？尽管以前的大多数研究都集中在具有许多社交联系的“中心”个人的预测能力上，但需要哪些客户行为数据来源来解决这个问题仍不清楚，主要是由于可用数据集的稀缺性同时捕捉个人的购买模式和社会互动。在这里，我们在一个独特的、大规模的数据集中解决了这个问题，该数据集将个人的信用卡购买历史与他们在整个国家的社会和流动特征相结合。令人惊讶的是，我们发现仅购买历史记录就可以检测到一小组“发现者” 他们的早期购买为他们访问的实体店提供了可靠的成功预测。与大多数现有关于口碑过程的研究的假设相反，社交网络中心性选择的中心并不能始终如一地预测成功。我们的研究结果表明，可以访问大规模采购数据的公司和组织可以检测发现者并利用他们的行为来预测市场趋势，而无需社交网络数据。