مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد نقش شبکه های مصرف کننده (الزویر)

Product characteristics are typically considered as given when economists study firms’ strategies and behaviour. But firms in industries with product differentiation actually choose the features of their products based on consumers’ preferences. The role and effects of the demand side in product differentiation processes have been neglected by the relevant literature (Coombs et al., 2001; Mueller et al., 2015) and only recently have started to receive attention (Andersen, 2007). The importance of consumer behaviour in shaping markets’ properties is oversighted and in most cases the simplistic perspective of perfect rational homogeneous agents is implicitly adopted in the literature (Valente, 2012). Among the works highlighting the relevance of demand for the emergence of new products, Witt (2001), Saviotti (2001), Malerba et al. (2007), Windrum et al. (2009), Nelson and Consoli (2010), Valente (2012), Markey-Towler and Foster (2013), Mueller et al. (2015), Markey-Towler (2016) and Schlaile et al. (2017) can be included. However, no attention has been paid to advancing a generalized evolutionary model of demand for the effect of consumers’ social networks on their consumption decisions and, in turn, on firms’ process of developing new characteristics for their products. The aim of this paper is to address this gap in the literature by suggesting a way to understand the relevance of consumers’ social networks in shaping demand behaviour in such markets, which in turn frame the process of product-embodied innovations. We do so using complex networks, which mathematically are described by graph objects. We develop a stylized computational model to examine the issue of product differentiation in a multi-dimensional space with consumers’ choices emerging from consumers’ opinion-based multilayered networks. The model that we propose is designed to analyze and illustrate potential effects of consumers’ heterogeneity, particularly regarding their preferences, their bounded rationality and the role of their social networks on the development of new product characteristics. We ask two questions: First, how consumers’ social networks affect their decisions on which products to buy and how this decision leads to market-share inequality at the firm level? Second, how firms respond to these decisions by developing new characteristics for their products defined over a multidimensional characteristic space?