Competitive strategies in the motion picture industry: An ABM to study investment decisions

We study a parsimonious competition setting whereby two studio producers launch their movies simultaneously. They compete deciding about the positioning of their movies, as they can position close to or far from the mainstream, and investing in advertising and in quality. We study our competitive setting with an analytical model and solve it using a standard game-theoretical technique. Next, we use an agent-based model (ABM) to relax several assumptions of the analytical model and investigate more realistic market situations, such as symmetric as well as asymmetric positioning, competitions among big and/or small studios, settings with more than two competitors, and studios that use weighted and evolving decision rules. Our results explain interesting dynamics behind the scenes of the competition. They indicate the drivers of studios' behaviors and shed light on some important aspects of their strategic competition. In this sense, our results offer relevant theoretical and practical implications

Effects of social networks on innovation diffusion and marketing dynamics

The main goal of this thesis is to incorporate part of the flourishing literature on network structures in a marketing context. Most of the results we have obtained and presented generate several implications. First of all we hope that the reader, after going through these chapters is convinced that often networks do play a role, that they can explain different market dynamics and that studying networks can be used to develop marketing strategies. Most of the theoretical implications derive from the following metaphor: a new product that diffuses into a society of consumers is like an epidemic that spreads into a population of susceptible individuals. Inspired by this metaphor, we believe that marketing can gain useful insights studying, adjusting and adopting epidemic models. This is what we explicitly do in chapters 2, 3 and 4. We build different network structures of consumers with their preferences and their attributes and we study how the diffusion dynamics of different products vary. Although we believe that the diffusion of a new product might look like the spread of an epidemic, we are also aware that these two processes are not completely the same. A substantial part of the work presented here consists of adapting the epidemic models to a marketing framework that can include product characteristics, personal preferences and social influence.