Agent-Based Modeling of Automobile Producer and Consumer Behavior to Support Design for Market Systems Analysis Available to Purchase

Improving design for market systems analysis relies on understanding the motivations and interactions among producers and consumers. Producers should theoretically develop their strategies for designing new products based on consumer demand and the expected profits from their sales. In this study, an agent-based modeling approach is proposed to simulate consumer and producer behavior for use in market systems analysis, and it is demonstrated through a simplified automobile market. In the model, consumers make heterogeneous purchasing decisions based on product attributes, which provides the producers with insights into their preferences and how to improve upon these design attributes over time. Emergent behavior of the model shows that analyzing the behavior of consumers provides the opportunity for producers to compete which one another with different strategies to improve their designs by investing in technology improvements. This lays the foundation for future work that can model how different business and regulatory strategies, social structures, and policies influence consumer and producer behavior, which in turn influences economic, environmental, and social impacts.