Market system dynamics

Abstract

How do markets change? What becomes valuable and virtuous, what worthless and immoral? Why do some consumer identities and experiences become more widespread than others? And why can some of the most passionate consumers cause the greatest harm to a successful market whereas some of the most critical observers contribute to a market’s stability over time? During the last decade, a thriving and diverse subfield of marketing research, originally termed by Giesler (2003, 2008) Market system dynamics, has emerged to help answer these and other questions about markets, how they are constituted as complex social systems and how actors and institutions actively shape (and are shaped by) them, thereby challenging three problematic biases plaguing marketing scholarship at the beginning of the 21st century: the economic actor bias, the micro-level bias and the variance bias (see Figure 1).