Generalized Innovation Diffusion Modeling & Weighted Criteria Based Ranking

Research in the field of innovation diffusion has been based on modeling and understanding the differing behavior of adopters in marketplace. The acceptance of innovation depends upon how the information about the product has diffused in the social system. During product's life cycle, adoption of the product takes place in the following manner; first the information about the product reaches the potential buyers and then from informed buyers the adoption takes place. First process can be termed as Product Awareness Process (PAWP) and the later one can be termed as Product Adoption Process (PADP). In this paper, we propose a generalized approach for innovation diffusion modeling that takes care of product awareness process and product adoption process as two separate scenarios (studied jointly) before the product is eventually bought by the user. Convolution of probability distribution function has been used to make the distinction between two processes. Furthermore, a set of five comparison criteria have been formulated and each criteria has been assigned different weights to rank the proposed models. Validation is done on two different consumer durables and results show that the weighted criteria approach is a very capable methodology for models comparison.