Re: Simulating Individual Behaviour

[r . marks]

>From: address@hidden
>To: address@hidden
>Subject: Re: Simulating Individual B
>Date: Thu, 17 Apr 1997 10:13:28 -0600
>
>> 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....
>
I'm pleased that the question of who studies consumer behaviour has been
taken up, and answered.  As well as the databases mentioned by Chris, there
are also the databases from scanners in supermarkets, although it is not so
easy to obtain access to these.  (As a plug, see a recent paper by my
coauthors and me which uses some scanner data in an ABM model:
Midgley DF, Marks RE, and Cooper LG, "Breeding hybrid strategies"
_Management Science_ 43(3): 257-275, March 1997.)

Another area of data on individual consumer behaviour in economics comes from
experimental economics: examining the choices of subjects in laboratory
settings, when faced with varying settings.

Robert Marks


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