An Exploratory Study On The Application Of The Computer Modeling In Consumer Behavior

As a particular study method, computer modeling has been applied wildly and achieved a lot of fruits in many social sciences. However, in the consumer behavior domain, the usage of computer modeling is still deficient. This mainly may be stemmed from these two following reasons: One is the lack of the analysis of the applicability of computer modeling in the research of consumer behavior, namely not yet systematic explaining "whether is suitable"; the other is the discussion of how to apply the method in consumer behavior research is still not carried on, namely not yet answering "how to use".In view of these two questions, this thesis combined the analysis of the subject characteristic of the consumer behavior and the method specialty of the computer modeling to research the applicability and the usage method of computer modeling in the research of consumer behavior exploringly. And this will establish the foundation to take this tool to the consumer behavior research area.To achieve the research goal, this thesis takes the combination of the theory and the example analysis as the core, and the research launched from the applicability analysis, the concrete modeling thoughts and the model example. Af the first part of the paper, computer modeling is compared with the normal research method of consumer behavior to discuss the advantage and the limitation of the usage of the computer modeling in the research of consumer behavior. Then the second part aims at the complexity of consumer behavior and introduces the modeling thoughts based on multi-agent. And with the last part of the thesis, two example models are designed and achieved to experiment the usage of computer modeling in some consumer behavior research. These two models combined with the theory analysis bring the research some more forward.