Modeling and Control in Social Dynamics

Is adoption of new products affected by the social network? Mathematical Marketing and Agent-Based approaches

Gadi Fibich

Tel Aviv University

The adoption of new products which mainly spread through word-of-mouth (such as fax machines, skype, facebook, Ipad, etc.) is one of the key problems in Marketing research. Ideally, given the sales data of the first few months, one would like to be able to predict both the future sales and the overall market potential. In this talk I will first present the classic Bass model and the agent-based approach for the adoption of new products. Then, I will present analytic results on the effect of the social network on the adoption of new products.