Inter-event time interval analysis of organizational-level activity: Venture capital market case

Xin Zhang, Sheng Xie, André L.M. Vilela and H. Eugene Stanley

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2019, vol. 516, issue C, 346-355

Abstract: Examining the venture capital market as a representative case, we made the first empirical study about timing and rhythm in organizational behavior. We analyze inter-event time intervals and find that the fat-tailed property of organizational behavior is similar that found in individual behavior, but that its lower scaling exponent indicates it is more heterogeneous than individual behavior. We quantify the observable burst and memory effect in organizational behavior. The burst effect occurs when organizations make frequent business deals during a short time period. This is a potential factor affecting economic cycles and market turbulence. The memory effect occurs when future organizational behavior correlates with past behavior, which potentially allows the prediction of future behavior. We find fewer bursts and a stronger memory effect in organizational behavior than in individual behavior. This difference may be related to resource constraint, business routine, and market competition. These findings shed light on the changeable features of organizational behavior and economic system. We drew a necessity to extend study on human dynamics to organization dynamics by exploring real organizational data in a wide range and proposing a mechanism to better modeling organizational behaviors. Understanding the temporal characteristics of organizational behavior is essential to understanding economic complexities.

Keywords: Inter-event time distribution; Complex system; Organizational behavior; Temporal network (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437118311828
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:516:y:2019:i:c:p:346-355

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2018.09.050

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().