  Economies are instances of complex socio-technical systems that are shaped by
the interactions of large numbers of individuals. The individual behavior and
decision-making of consumer agents is determined by complex psychological
dynamics that include their own assessment of present and future economic
conditions as well as those of others, potentially leading to feedback loops
that affect the macroscopic state of the economic system. We propose that the
large-scale interactions of a nation's citizens with its online resources can
reveal the complex dynamics of their collective psychology, including their
assessment of future system states. Here we introduce a behavioral index of
Chinese Consumer Confidence (C3I) that computationally relates large-scale
online search behavior recorded by Google Trends data to the macroscopic
variable of consumer confidence. Our results indicate that such computational
indices may reveal the components and complex dynamics of consumer psychology
as a collective socio-economic phenomenon, potentially leading to improved and
more refined economic forecasting.
