Research Paper: Big Data Analytics Shows How America’s Individualism Complicates Coronavirus Response

Research
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Very excited to share our recent work with Bo Bian , Ting Xu and Natasha Foutz on how individualism shapes online charitable crowdfunding and social distancing through big data analytics on population-scale online charity and individual-level smartphone location data. We found that individualism could offset around 41% of the effectiveness of state lockdown orders on social distancing and diminish COVID crowdfunding by 48%. We also suggest that this negative effect of individualism could be mitigated by government subsidies (such as CARES act) and strategic communications about the benefits of collective actions.
You can take a look at news at: Big Data Analytics Shows How America’s Individualism Complicates Coronavirus Response | UVA Today

The short version of our paper is at: [#bigdataanalytics](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3620364>. We only worked on this for five weeks and your comments and feedback are highly appreciated! <Sign Up | LinkedIn) #covidresearch

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Thanks a bunch for sharing your research (and it’s quite amazing how much interesting content is in there for what you say is 5-weeks worth of work). While I am still reading/taking in information, I have a quick question about the analysis of the crowdfunding data: could county level internet infrastructure (e.g. broadband access in certain counties is still surprisingly poor) be a factor; some sort of data that looks at online transactions (similar to E-Stats?) might give an indication / proxy for broadband access as well. Anyway, thanks again, this is good stuff!