Novel Approaches for Analyzing Market Structure Evolution

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Bernd Skiera
• Subject Area: Accounting and Finance
• Term: from 2021 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 456211663

Market structure analysis is central to market research and marketing strategy. Most extant approaches to market structure analysis are designed for static analysis – that is, they reveal who is competing with whom (and how strongly) at a single point in time. Yet, as markets are in constant flux, market structure evolves over time. Analyzing this evolution would allow researchers and managers to better understand when and how new competitors arise, firms adjust their positioning or whole new submarkets emerge. Compared to a static analysis, the analysis of market structure evolution, however, demands different approaches, which we aim to develop in this project. Specifically, we plan to combine newly developed methods with methodological advances from other fields (such as network science and natural language processing) and integrate them into novel approaches for market structure analysis. We then plan to apply the proposed approaches in three empirical studies to (i) detect and evaluate changes in market structure, (ii) test the predictability of the identified changes and (iii) demonstrate how to transfer the proposed approaches to other domains, such as political science.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: USA
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Daniel Ringel