Eur. Phys. J. B 64, 293-300 (2008)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2008-00289-3

Emergence of product differentiation from consumer heterogeneity and asymmetric information

¹ Department of Systems Science, School of Management, Beijing Normal University, 100875 Beijing, P.R. China
² Lab of Information Economy and Internet Research, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, 610054 Chengdu, P.R. China
³ Physics Department, University of Fribourg, Pérolles, 1700 Fribourg, Switzerland
⁴ Institute for Scientific Interchange, via S. Severo 65, 10113 Turin, Italy

Corresponding author: ^a matus.medo@unifr.ch

Received: 8 April 2008
Revised: 25 June 2008
Published online: 18 July 2008

Abstract

We introduce a fully probabilistic framework of consumer product choice based on quality assessment. It allows us to capture many aspects of marketing such as partial information asymmetry, quality differentiation, and product placement in a supermarket.