Browsing by Subject "clustering, agent-based model, location choice, power-law distribution pattern, retailing"

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    Retail Location Choice with Complementary Goods: An Agent-based Model
    (ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, 2009) Huang, Arthur; Levinson, David M
    This paper examines the emergence of retail clusters on a supply chain network comprised of suppliers, retailers, and consumers. An agent-based model is proposed to investigate retail location distribution in a market of two complementary goods. The methodology controls for supplier locales and unit sales prices of retailers and suppliers; a consumer's willingness to patronize a retailer depends on the total travel distance of buying both goods. On a circle comprised of discrete locations, retailers play a non-cooperative game of location choice to maximize individual profits. Our findings suggest that the number of clusters in equilibrium follow a power-law distribution and that hierarchical distribution patterns are much more likely to occur than the spread-out ones. In addition, retailers of complementary goods tend to co-locate at supplier locales. Sensitivity tests on the number of retailers and retailers' sequence of moving are also performed.