Utility Discounting Explains Informational Website Traffic Patterns Before a Hurricane.

摘要

We demonstrate that psychological models of utility discounting can explain the pattern of increased hits to weather websites in the days preceding a predicted weather disaster. We parsed the HTTP request lines issued by the web proxy for a mid-sized enterprise leading up to a hurricane, filtering for visits to weather-oriented websites. We fit four discounting models to the observed activity and found that our data matched hyperboloid models extending hyperbolic discounting.