A Study Of Market Network Structure

The study approach of evolutionary economics has long been impacting the theoretical system of neoclassical economics, whereas the traditional economics has been bogged down in discussing the nature and structural features of the market for a long time. This paper aims at proposing a new theoretical point of view of the market structure with the ideas and research methods of evolutionary economics. Specifically, it aims to establish a perspective of the complex network system of the market, and study the structure of market network, so as to discuss the behavioral characteristics of economic entity in it.At the beginning of the study, this paper analyzed the nature of market network system, making it as the basis of the whole research. For convenience, this paper presents four assumptions, namely:the heterogeneity of enterprise, bounded rationality of market participants, that homooeconomicus pursues the optimization rather than the maximization of the utility (profit), and the widespread of asymmetric information.The following study is divided into two parts:the first part creates an analysis method of producer-marketer-consumer in the market network system, so as to study the enterprise and individual behavior in the subsystem of industry market; in the second part, the author tries to establish an analytical framework of the network structure in industry market, and study the types of the competitive market through the strength and the way of the joint connection.Traditional ideas tend to divide both sides of supply and demand simply, forming a trading model of producer-consumer sectors. However, by analyzing the node behavior of the producer network, this paper finds that there are inseparable relations between the development characteristics of the heterogeneous and network evolution trend of population stratification. In the production chain, the enterprises not only divide the labor in accordance with the technical conditions, but also would gradually be stratified into producers and marketers, two different function-oriented groups, according to the trading terms. Such heterogeneity of enterprise function is concomitant with producer network-marketer Network. As for the consumers, the reality that consumers are also the participants of the production greatly reverses the asymmetries of transaction information. The popularity of information networks also rapidly creates and collects a large number of consume-driven consumer networks. Although the life of consumer network is brief, it plays an important role in the transaction-oriented collective action of consumers, and also provides strong support for marketers to obtain the buyer's market force to compete with producers. With the macro-structure of the market network being divided into three sectors, vertical restraints on market pricing and new market form such as bilateral market can also be incorporated into the framework and get reasonable explanations.According to the network structure model of three sectors, the second part of this thesis proposed a new method, i.e. classifying the types of the competitive market according to the shape and strength of relations based on transactions. Through dividing the connection relationship into strongly connected, weakly connected, this thesis re-interprets the effect of advertising using the model of information transmission of the bilateral connection; and with the connection model of three sectors, it conducted an analysis of Resale-price Maintenance.The innovation of this paper is mainly reflected in the perspective and method of research. It is a novel point of view to take market as a network system, which abandons the tradition to pay great attention to studying the behavior of economic entity while ignoring the economic relations, which is equivalent to turn the perspective of the physical world of economic research from Newtonian mechanics to the field theory. The analysis of the behavior of economic entity is based on the dynamic network subsystem formed under the given conditions. In this perspective, the behavior results of economic entity depend on the overall activities of the network subsystem, so any priori subjective motives cannot be verified by the final results. This is in line with the logic of cause-effect relationship. In addition, the innovation in hypothesis is also worth mentioning. The assumption of economies heterogeneity is always taken as an important condition throughout the study. The heterogeneity of the enterprise constitutes a solid foundation for market network under the impulse of specialized labor division and the avoidance of transaction costs. Consumer heterogeneity, on the other hand, becomes the basis on the demand side to continuously expand market capacity as well as the boost for the independence of marketing network.