Abstract
When a new product enters the market, individual consumers’ decision-making behavior and purchase time are uncertain. Based on the dynamics of epidemic transmission theory and agent modeling technology, this study proposes a new coupling model through the combination of the improved SEIR epidemic model and the heterogeneous agent model. This model considers consumer heterogeneity resulting from three aspects in consumers’ sensitivity, network topology, and considerations of information flow received. It aims to analyze how consumer heterogeneity affects the scale and speed of new product diffusion. The proposed model showed that consumers’ characteristics and behavior combination at the microlevel lead to the diversity of nonlinear diffusion curves at the macrolevel for new products. Moreover, a pilot study is conducted to simulate this model and examine how to estimate the model’s parameters using aggregated data about film products. The pilot study results suggested that different consumer characteristics and behavior combinations affect the scale and speed of new product diffusion to varying degrees. In different scenarios, there were significant differences in the influence of the degree of consumer heterogeneity on diffusion, accompanied by the occurrence of threshold. The results of the empirical analysis in this study are in line with reality.
Highlights
Successful introduction of new products to the market has become important
Based on the assumption of consumer heterogeneity, due to the consumers’ adaptive ability, they constantly update their decisions with the change in the dynamic environment and interactions between consumers so that the transition probability between the states in the SMBQ model is no longer a constant parameter, but a function of a consumer and time t. erefore, an individuallevel model is needed to explain the characteristics and behavior rules of consumers. e heterogeneous agent model (HAM) provides a tool for understanding and analyzing this complex pattern. is section obtains the behavior rules and purchase decisions of individual consumers from three aspects: consumer sensitivity heterogeneity, consumer heterogeneity caused by network topology, and information flow
We built a new coupling model based on the combination of the improved SEIR model and HAM. is model can be used to analyze the diffusion dynamic mechanism of new products under consumer heterogeneity, and the parameterization of the model is shown based on experimental data
Summary
Successful introduction of new products to the market has become important. The improved SEIR model can describe the dynamic characteristics of new product diffusion at the macroscopic level, it lacks explanatory power for the microscopic mechanism It is still controversial whether it can truly reflect the behavior of heterogeneous individuals at the microlevel [1, 3], and the mathematical verification of the model is very challenging after adding consumer heterogeneity. To establish a relationship between the macro- and micro-levels, as well as to reveal how individual characteristics and behaviors at the microlevel affect the diffusion scale, speed, and volatility of the overall purchase behavior of new products at the macrolevel, it is urgent to propose an empirically based coupling model combining the macro- and micro-levels.
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