Multi-Agent-based Simulation Of Network Consumer Purchase Decision-making

In recent ten years, both electronic commerce and network marketing theories have gone through a rapid development. After summarizing and drawing these previous achievements, we will establish a dynamic model which described online consumers'purchase decision-making. Starts from the consumer's psychology and their motivation, this model discusses effecting factors that could influence the consumer agent's purchase decision-making. These effecting factors include market conditions, agent's personality traits or socio-demographic, advertising and interactions between the consumer agent and other agents. All these dimensions cause consumer agents'different purchase motivation and further lead to a diverse purchase decisions. Among these factors, market conditions refer to a network product's price and quality, the seller's service and online shopping risks, and the consumer agents' personality trait means we want to know how the market conditions affecting network consumer's psychology, which has a close relation to the consumers' socio-demographic. Whereas the interactions between the consumer agent and other agents explain how the network evaluation system and the consumer's family or friends affect the consumer agents'purchase decision-making.Combining theoretical analysis and system modeling and simulation, this paper explains the conceptual model and simulated network consumers'purchase process which justifies the previous conceptual model using the technique of ABM and MAS. In the course of dynamic simulation, the paper introduces a common market phenomenon called decoy effect. After converting the conceptual model into a mathematical formula, we will explain the principle of decoy effect and will show the existence of it.Theoretical discussions are always followed by practical implications. For example, the network consumer purchase decision-making model states consumer agents'changing psychology, the explain of decoy will make the application more explicit and flexible which means network sellers can utilize this effect to formulate their own marketing strategy in order that they can improve the competitiveness. The paper also discusses the future research themes of network consumer purchase decision-making briefly.