DMS Statistics and Data Science Seminar

Speaker: Dr. Mariangela Guidolin (University of Padua)

Title: Innovation Diffusion Models: Theory and Practice

Abstract: The seminar is a general overview of a class innovation diffusion models that can be used to describe and forecast the evolution in time of sales of new products or technologies. Starting from the basic Bass model (BM), the seminar will be devoted to present some of its generalizations, which account for the presence of exogenous shocks, affecting the timing of the diffusion process, and for the presence of a dynamic market potential, as a function of a communication process, which develops over time. Moreover, some generalizations of the univariate BM are proposed to account for the presence of competition. The statistical techniques involved in model estimation combine time-series analysis with nonlinear regression techniques. The key objectives of the seminar are: to describe the main mathematical features of the models, discussing the meaning of the parameters from the economic point of view with real-data applications; to present and discuss the statistical aspects involved in model estimation and selection; to show and discuss predictive and explanatory ability of the proposed models, highlighting the properties and limitations of each of the models described.