Reciprocity of mobile phone calls

Dynamics of Socio-Economic Systems, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 138-151 (2011) We present a study of the reciprocity of human behaviour based on mobile phone usage records. The underlying question is whether human relationships are mutual, in the sense that both are equally active in keeping up the relations...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors Kovanen, Lauri, Saramaki, Jari, Kaski, Kimmo
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published 03.02.2010
Subjects
Physics - Physics and Society
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Summary:Dynamics of Socio-Economic Systems, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 138-151 (2011) We present a study of the reciprocity of human behaviour based on mobile phone usage records. The underlying question is whether human relationships are mutual, in the sense that both are equally active in keeping up the relationship, or is it on the contrary typical that relationships are lopsided, with one party being significantly more active than the other. We study this question with the help of a mobile phone data set consisting of all mobile phone calls between 5.3 million customers of a single mobile phone operator. It turns out that lopsided relations are indeed quite common, to the extent that the variation cannot be explained by simple random deviations or by variations in personal activity. We also show that there is no non-trivial correlation between reciprocity and local network density.
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.1002.0763