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More »What are the chances that a person will respond to your email in the next hour? And why is the reply so terse? New study by USC Viterbi School of Engineering researchers finds that email responses depend on a variety of factors including age, platform, volume and timing.
The paper, "Evolutions of Conversations in the Age of Email Overload," by doctoral student Farshad Kooti, and Kristina Lerman, Research Associate professor in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Computer Science Department and a project lead of the USC Information Sciences Institute, along with colleagues at Yahoo! Labs, was presented at the World Wide Web Conference. The paper is the largest study of email to date, measuring how the volume of incoming email affects behaviors of recipients and the length of time it takes them to reply to emails. The study was conducted in accordance with privacy standards: individuals opted in to the study, the data was anonymized, and the emails were not read by humans."
Why isn't he/she responding yet? The researchers indicate a variety of factors are in play. While you may be obsessing if an email never arrived or has gone into someone's spam file, you should note, the researchers say 90 percent of people respond within a day or two of receiving an email to which they plan to respond. The most likely reply time is two minutes, and half of responders will respond in just under an hour.
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What are the chances that a person will respond to your email in the next hour? And why is the reply so terse? New study by USC Viterbi School of Engineering researchers finds that email responses depend on a variety of factors including age, platform, volume and timing.
The paper, "Evolutions of Conversations in the Age of Email Overload," by doctoral student Farshad Kooti, and Kristina Lerman, Research Associate professor in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Computer Science Department and a project lead of the USC Information Sciences Institute, along with colleagues at Yahoo! Labs, was presented at the World Wide Web Conference. The paper is the largest study of email to date, measuring how the volume of incoming email affects behaviors of recipients and the length of time it takes them to reply to emails. The study was conducted in accordance with privacy standards: individuals opted in to the study, the data was anonymized, and the emails were not read by humans."
Why isn't he/she responding yet? The researchers indicate a variety of factors are in play. While you may be obsessing if an email never arrived or has gone into someone's spam file, you should note, the researchers say 90 percent of people respond within a day or two of receiving an email to which they plan to respond. The most likely reply time is two minutes, and half of responders will respond in just under an hour.
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