Several recent comparative studies have shown a labour productivity gap in respect of UK retailing when compared with other countries, notably France and the USA. This article seeks to identify, through an overview of existing data and related research, the extent to which retail productivity in...

Darwinian studies of collective human behaviour, which deal fluently with change and are grounded in the details of social influence among individuals, have much to offer “social” models from the physical sciences which have elegant statistical regularities. Although Darwinian evolution is...

In this paper, we introduce a modified collaborative filtering (MCF) algorithm, which has remarkably higher accuracy than the standard collaborative filtering. In the MCF, instead of the cosine similarity index, the user–user correlations are obtained by a diffusion process. Furthermore, by...

Recommender systems use data on past user preferences to predict possible future likes and interests. A key challenge is that while the most useful individual recommendations are to be found among diverse niche objects, the most reliably accurate results are obtained by methods that recommend...

Econophysics has already made a number of important empirical contributions to our understanding of the social and economic world. These fall mainly into the areas of finance and industrial economics, where in each case there is a large amount of reasonably well-defined data. More recently,...