Motivating retail marketing efforts under fairness concerns in small-world networks: A multi-agent simulation

Abstract

When manufacturer motivates retailer groups to increase sales efforts with a linear transfer payment contract, we assume that retailers concern about fairness and the channel structure which retailer access to information corresponds to the small-world network, and built a multi-agent model to mainly observe the impact of small-world network characteristics on the incentive effects. Experimental results show that the greater probability of replacement objects, the lower manufacturer's profit and products sales. The retailer gets very small amount of other retailers related information will have a huge negative impact on incentive effects, if the number of objects in comparison achieves a certain number, the manufacturers profit and products sales will not be affected to a large extent. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.