Re: Simulating Individual B

[cgl]

> Actually, consumer behaviour is an important research area in the field of
> marketing (which seems to be a mixture of applied microeconomic and
> psychology, at least to an outsider).

  Right - I think that there is a tremendous amount of data on 
consumers that have been taken in market "demographic" studies,
and of course there are Nielson ratings, the Billboard top-10
and etc...

  These data exist in corporations, and they may or may not be
available to scientists for research use.

  One group working with such data in the context of ABMs is
the Emergent Solutions group at Coopers and Lybrand, who have 
been building models of the propagation of fads and fashions 
throughout (initially music) markets - they used a 
demographic data base of 150,000 americans, provided by
(I'm assuming) the entertainment industry....

  Just one example of how there might, in fact, be data out there
that has been collected by other groups for other purposes ...

Chris




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