Guo, Jian; MMS
CARLETON UNIVERSITY (CANADA), 1998
BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION, MARKETING (0338)
One of the major tasks of the modern firms is the development of new products.
Forecasting the sales of
these new products is of critical importance to diffusion models make forecasts
or present a description
of the diffusion process but few of these models deal with the multilevel substitution
phenomenon. This
thesis focuses on developing a new approach to estimating the parameters of
diffusion models for
describing multilevel substitution and comparing the predictive ability of selected
models with that of a
new one. Two sets of sales data, Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) and Tire
Cord fabric, have
been selected for testing. The findings of this study suggest that (1) new models
built by new approach
have better predictive ability than other selected models, (2) the internal
influence of diffusion process
decreases and external influence of diffusion process increases over product
generations.
Social
Systems Simulation Group
P.O. Box 6904 San Diego, CA 92166-0904 Roland Werner, Principal Phone/FAX (619) 660-1603 |