Tobias Preis

In 2015, Preis and his colleague Suzy Moat designed and delivered a massive open online course (MOOC) on big data. The course focuses on measuring and predicting human behavior.

In 2013, Preis and his colleagues Suzy Moat and H. Eugene Stanley introduced a method to identify online precursors for stock market moves, using trading strategies based on search volume data provided by Google Trends. Their analysis of Google search volume for 98 terms of varying financial relevance, published in Scientific Reports, suggests that increases in search volume for financially relevant search terms tend to precede large losses in financial markets. Similarly, in a study also published in Scientific Reports in 2013, Suzy Moat, Preis and colleagues demonstrated a link between changes in the number of views of Wikipedia articles relating to financial topics and subsequent large stock market moves.

In 2012, Preis used Google Trends data to demonstrate together with his colleagues Suzy Moat, H. Eugene Stanley and Steven R. Bishop that Internet users from countries with a higher per capita gross domestic product (GDP) are more likely to search for information about the future than information about the past. The findings, published in the journal Scientific Reports, suggest there may be a link between online behaviour and real-world economic indicators. Preis and colleagues examined Google search queries made by Internet users in 45 different countries in 2010 and calculated the ratio of the volume of searches for the coming year (2011) to the volume of searches for the previous year (2009), which they call the Future Orientation Index. A comparison of the Future Orientation Index to the per capita GDP of each country revealed a strong tendency for countries in which Google users enquire more about the future to exhibit a higher GDP. Preis and colleagues conclude from this study that a relationship potentially exists between the economic success of a country and the information-seeking behaviour of its citizens online.

Tobias Preis is Professor of Behavioral Science and Finance at Warwick Business School and a fellow of the Alan Turing Institute. He is a computational social scientist focussing on measuring and predicting human behavior with online data. At Warwick Business School he directs the Data Science Lab together with his colleague Suzy Moat. Preis holds visiting positions at Boston University and University College London. In 2011, he worked as a senior research fellow with H. Eugene Stanley at Boston University and with Dirk Helbing at ETH Zurich. In 2009, he was named a member of the Gutenberg Academy. In 2007, he founded Artemis Capital Asset Management GmbH, a proprietary trading firm which is based in Germany. He was awarded a Ph.D. in physics from the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in Germany.

In 2010, Preis headed a research team which provided evidence that search engine query data and stock market fluctuations are correlated. The team discovered a link between the number of Internet searches for company names and transaction volumes of the corresponding stocks on a weekly time scale. In a TEDx talk, Preis highlights the opportunities offered by studies of citizens' online behaviour to gain insights into socio and economic decision making.