The present paper tries to answer analytically how much the reference group influence can affect an actual market share of a particular brand or product. It is found that the increase of the size of a reference group and the probability of following the majority within the reference group may lead to the temporary modest prevalence of one brand. This result requires a relatively large size of a...

Virtual communities are self-selecting groups of individuals engaged in sustained computer-mediated interactions around common interests or goals, governed by shared norms and values, and serving individual and shared needs. This work proposes and empirically tests the model of social influence on individual shopping preferences in the context of virtual communities. This work proposed and supp...

In this paper we discuss the problem of how to assess academic productivity based on publication outputs. We are interested in knowing how well a research group in an area of knowledge is doing relatively to a pre-selected set of reference groups, where each group is composed by academics or researchers. To assess academic productivity we adopt a new metric we propose, which we call P-score. We...

Making better use of the cache is important for the modern computer programs and systems. One key step is understanding the data locality. In this article, we investigate one effective and important model of data locality—reference affinity. This model is superior to previous ones because it can express whole-scale locality in a more accurate and flexible way. Traces collected from different ap...

This paper introduces and empirically explores the concept of an organizational reference group: the set of people an individual perceives as belonging to his or her work environment that defines the social world of work in which he or she engages. The concept is proposed to fill a gap in studies of social context. Scholars tend only to infer, not identify, the people an individual is aware of ...

Many of the personality and behavioral traits (e.g., social imperviousness, directness in conversation, lack of imagination, affinity for solitude, difficulty displaying emotions) that are known to be sensitive to context (with whom?) and reference group (according to whom?) also appear in questionnaire-based assessments of autistic traits. Therefore, two experiments investigated the effects of...