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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 3: Focus Session: Swarm Intelligence - Contributed Talks
SOE 3.2: Talk
Monday, March 14, 2011, 12:15–12:30, GÖR 226
Complex dynamics of our economic life on different scales: insights from search engine query data — •Tobias Preis1, 2, 3, Daniel Reith3, and H. Eugene Stanley1 — 1Center for Polymer Studies, Department of Physics, 590 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215, USA — 2Artemis Capital Asset Management GmbH, Gartenstrasse 14, 65558 Holzheim, Germany — 3Institute of Physics, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Staudingerweg 7, 55128 Mainz, Germany
Search engine query data deliver insight into the behaviour of individuals who are the smallest possible scale of our economic life. Individuals are submitting several hundred million search engine queries around the world each day. We study weekly search volume data for various search terms from 2004 to 2010 that are offered by the search engine Google for scientific use, providing information about our economic life on an aggregated collective level. We ask the question whether there is a link between search volume data and financial market fluctuations on a weekly time scale. Both collective swarm intelligence of Internet users and the group of financial market participants can be regarded as a complex system of many interacting subunits that react quickly to external changes. We find clear evidence that weekly transaction volumes of S&P 500 companies are correlated with weekly search volume of corresponding company names. Furthermore, we apply a recently introduced method for quantifying complex correlations in time series with which we find a clear tendency that search volume time series and transaction volume time series show recurring patterns.