(A) place-aware social matching model for predicting serendipitous interactions

Abstract

In the era of perpetual digital connectedness, information and communication technology has significantly altered the way people communicate and interact each other. Nonetheless, the computer-mediated communication should only complement offline communication rather than substituting them, as the resultant online ties are not as strong as the face-to-face ties. In an effort to understand the motives in making offline social interactions real and ultimately to predict the willingness to engage in serendipitous interactions with people encountered in a public place, in this dissertation, we propose a place-aware social matching model that consists of interpersonal factors (i.e., similarity, complementarity, and intimacy) and socio-spatial factors (i.e., place sociability, information acquisition expectancy, and perceived personal space in a place). We have conducted (1) two web-based survey experiments to examine mutual causality and dependency relationships of interpersonal factors, socio-spatial factors, and serendipitous interaction willingness and (2) one filed experiment to test the performance of the place-aware social matching model, respectively. As a result, we found that both factors have statistically significant influence on interaction willingness, yet interpersonal factors have larger relative importance than the socio-spatial factors. An interesting finding is that the predictive power of these factors varies according to the place characteristics and the level of interaction willingness. The field experiment results reveal that the proposed model predicts the willingness in a real world about 15.4% error rate. Our findings have significant implications for the design of mobile social networking systems that facilitate serendipitous interactions in a certain place, that is, desirable serendipitous interaction could be discovered by not only interpersonal factors but also contextual features and perception of a place.