From Coco Krumme, Manuel Cebrian, and Alex Pentland:
Much of economic theory is built on observations of aggregate, rather than individual, behavior. Here, we present novel findings on human shopping patterns at the resolution of a single purchase. Our results suggest that much of our seemingly elective activity is actually driven by simple routines. While the interleaving of shopping events creates randomness at the small scale, on the whole consumer behavior is largely predictable. We also examine income-dependent differences in how people shop, and find that wealthy individuals are more likely to bundle shopping trips. These results validate previous work on mobility from cell phone data, while describing the unpredictability of behavior at higher resolution.
Traditionally, economic data hasn't had the granularity to distinguish between different groups of consumers. Like the exact solutions to the Ising Model, rational expectations theory is a kind of mean field approximation. Now that we have digital trails for individual consumers, improvements are being made to economic models of consumer behavior.
Note that this kind of theory and data doesn't fit easily within the scope of behavioral economics and finance. This isn't a laboratory study. This isn't a theory of psychology. When it comes to consumer behavior at least, we can now say with some empirical support behind us, that indeed "more is different."
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