The dynamics of news are such that some days are dominated by a single story while others see news outlets reporting on a range of different events. While these large-scale features of news are familiar to many, they are often ignored in settings where they may be important in understanding...

When making a decision, humans consider two types of information: information they have acquired through their prior experience of the world, and further information they gather to support the decision in question. Here, we present evidence that data from search engines such as Google can help...

This note is a sketch of what could be the basis for a theory of applied statistics. Such a theory is needed to help statistics become more relevant, with significant impact and innovative developments. To achieve this goal, statisticians need to get involved in new activities within the...

Recent literature on Adam Smith and other 18th Scottish thinkers shows an engaged conversation between the Scots and today's scholars in the sciences that deal with humans — social sciences, humanities, as well as neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.We share with the 18th century Scots...

The purpose of this paper is an introduction to scientific methods that are organized and systematic scientific approaches used by scholars for controlled investigations and experiments to efficiently solve theoretical and practical problems, generate discoveries and/or advance scientific...

In dialog with an well-known and controversial book of two French economists (Cahuc and Zylberberg (2016)), we propose, in this article, to point out the mirage implied in attempts to consider economics as the “physics of the social sciences”. Given the availability of large datasets and the...

Technology is becoming deeply interwoven into the fabric of society. The Internet has become a central source of information for many people when making day-to-day decisions. Here, we present a method to mine the vast data Internet users create when searching for information online, to identify...

The complex behavior of financial markets emerges from decisions made by many traders. Here, we exploit a large corpus of daily print issues of the Financial Times from 2nd January 2007 until 31st December 2012 to quantify the relationship between decisions taken in financial markets and...

Financial crises result from a catastrophic combination of actions. Vast stock market datasets offer us a window into some of the actions that have led to these crises. Here, we investigate whether data generated through Internet usage contain traces of attempts to gather information before...

Crises in financial markets affect humans worldwide. Detailed market data on trading decisions reflect some of the complex human behavior that has led to these crises. We suggest that massive new data sources resulting from human interaction with the Internet may offer a new perspective on the...