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Conference registration: how people react to a deadline

Nature Physics volume 3, page 746 (2007)Cite this article

To the Editor — The 'Statphys' conferences on statistical physics take place every three years on a different continent. The number of participants can fluctuate greatly from conference to conference, and it is important that the organizers have an idea of this number as early as possible.

Statphys 23 took place in Genova, Italy, on 9–13 July 2007 (ref. 1). The registration website was activated around the end of January, with the deadline for registration and abstract submission on 31 March. The influx of registrations showed, from the outset, clear linear behaviour. The problem was, however, that the extrapolation of this linear behaviour to the deadline gave a very low number of expected participants. Clearly people tend to register late and one should expect a steepening of the distribution as the deadline approaches — but by how much? Is it possible to predict accurately the final number of registrants?

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Figure 1: The distribution of registrations is shown for Statphys 23 (red triangles), up to the main deadline for abstract submission (T*), and for the EP2DS 17 conference (blue circles), rescaled with respect to the total number of participants; the solid line corresponds to a simple model in which the pressure to register is inversely proportional to the time left before the deadline.

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  1. Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Roma Sapienza, Roma, Italy

    Valentina Alfi, Giorgio Parisi & Luciano Pietronero

  2. Centro Studi e Ricerche E. Fermi, Roma, Italy

    Valentina Alfi

  3. Istituto dei Sistemi Complessi, CNR, Roma, Italy

    Luciano Pietronero

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  1. Valentina Alfi
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  2. Giorgio Parisi
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  3. Luciano Pietronero
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Alfi, V., Parisi, G. & Pietronero, L. Conference registration: how people react to a deadline. Nature Phys 3, 746 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys761

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