برآورد پویا از بازارهای نشان دهنده رفتار طعمه ـ شکارچی

The evolution of market concentration in high technology saturated markets with a dominant player is dynamically estimated, based on concepts of population biology. The mathematical description was performed using the Lotka–Volterra model and the corresponding parameters were estimated by genetic algorithms. The proposed methodology shows itself capable of estimating market equilibrium and market concentration, the latter expressed by corresponding market shares. Evaluation of the presented methodology in the area of fixed lines telecommunications market led to accurate results, as compared to historical data, in a specific case study. This methodology can provide valuable inputs for managerial decisions, strategic planning and regulatory decisions to the players of a high technology market.

Telecommunications are related with the biggest and most significant civil investment regarding new technologies and services. For a long period of time they used to operate under governmental provision and monopolistic regime, mainly because of governmental strategic perceptions and military security. During this time, the telecommunications industry was a relatively stable environment (van Kranenburg & Hagedoorn, 2008), since incumbent telecommunications operators offered only traditional voice and data transfer services via fixed telecommunications networks. The liberalization of basic fixed telephone services started during the mid-1990s. By 1999, competition for such services had become relatively common, although it was still not the policy of a majority of countries. During 1999 more than 40% of the countries in Europe and 35% of the countries in the Americas permitted competition for basic fixed services (Banerjee & Ros, 2004). However, only 22% of Asian, 15% of the Middle East, and 15% of African countries had followed. In 2000, competition for basic fixed services was still restricted in 105 countries. As far as Europe is concerned, since the 1990s the European Union (EU), in the context of its plans for a Single European Market, has been pursuing a common telecommunications regulatory policy aiming to establish a liberalized and harmonized pan-European telecommunications market, to stimulate economic growth, increase employment and the standard of living in the European Community. Towards this direction, the Commission of the European Community in the Green Paper (European Commission, 1987) has put forward the principles for the liberalization of the telecommunications sector and described the common policy, in view of the single market. The main goal of market opening and restructuring was to promote market structures that would enable the exploitation of substantial demand and innovation potentials in the communications industry. The initial regulation aimed to transform telecommunication monopolies into competitive industries. Since the 1st of January 1998 almost all of the telecommunication markets in the EU have been fully liberalized, although full liberalization was delayed in Portugal and Greece until 2000 and 2001, respectively (Grzybowski, 2008). As stated in (van Kranenburg & Hagedoorn, 2008), where an informative review regarding the European telecommunications industry can be found, “The liberalization of European telecommunications markets and the privatization of many historically state-owned telecommunications companies are probably the two most significant changes in the landscape”. Obviously, these changes amount to a substantially new worldwide environment for market players in the telecommunications area and present new challenges in terms of both new opportunities and new competitors. According to the contemporary economic theory regarding competition, (Baye, 2006 and Shy, 1995) downward pressure on the prices of telecommunication services is likely to lead service providers to introduce new pricing packages in order to better satisfy consumer preferences. This was exactly the case when liberalization started in the new converged telecommunication market, as a fierce competition emerged between the incumbent operators and the new companies that appeared, all trying to increase the number of their customers by providing services and products in very attractive prices. This is regarded as a significant dimension of the market structure, since it plays an important part in determining market power and therefore business behavior and performance in a market that was reformed from a monopolistic to oligopolistic or even to a more competitive structure. Studying the concentration of the new market schema is therefore necessary, in order to identify its possible peculiarities, to describe competitors’ behavior and to provide necessary inputs to legislation and regulation authorities, regarding market structure and the degree of competition (Curry and George, 1983, Marfels, 1972, Saving, Feb. 1970 and Tirole, 1988), as well as predictions for the future regarding, among others, potential entry of new providers (Baye, 2006 and Shy, 1995). Moreover, market concentration, as expressed by the values of market shares, is of major interest for providers as well, since it is strongly related to managerial decisions, available actions to be taken and expectations towards competition. Such decisions are usually accompanied by investments and business plans, targeting to enhance the ability of providers to meet the market’s demand. Since market shares reflect, among others, the influence of providers’ pricing policies over the subscribers, this is another important aspect to be taken under consideration. In the context of the present work, the evolution of fixed telephony market (PSTN) concentration is studied, based on the evolution of the corresponding market shares of both the incumbent and the alternative providers, by adopting approaches from evolutionary theory of population biology and population dynamics. More specifically, market evolution is estimated and forecasted by applying the Lotka–Volterra model that describes the interaction of species in a prey–predator mode (Murray, 2002 and Neal, 2004). Lotka–Volterra models have already been used in literature in order to model market dynamics, mainly in a duopolistic market (Kim et al., 2006, Lopez and Sanjuan, 2001, Tschirhart, 2000 and Wijeratne et al., 2007), or to provide forecasts for the stock market (Lee et al., 2005 and Modis, 1999).

The main target of this work is the proposal of a methodology, based on concepts of population biology, in order to describe the evolution of an already saturated high technology market havingone dominant player, which the rest players have to compete with, in order to retain survival and growth. The mathematical descrip- tion of the methodology was performed using the Lotka–Volterra model, in a prey–predator mode and the corresponding parameters were estimated by the means of genetic algorithms. The proposed methodology showed itself capable of estimating market equilib- rium and market concentration and it can be applied over any high technology market meeting the above characteristics, providing valuable inputs for managerial decisions, strategic planning and regulatory decisions to the players of a high technology market. As a case study, the structure of fixed lines market during the first stages after liberalization was evaluated and analyzed, over a number of European countries. The main assumption was to con-sider the incumbent and the alternative operators as prey and predator species, respectively, interacting for food supply. Evalua- tion results provided some very interesting information, regarding the estimation of the competition process and the market equilib- rium. According to these, given the current process dynamics, the incumbent operator is expected to loose domination of the market if it does not respond quickly in order to create or to sustain a com- petitive advantage. Indeed, the evaluation of the proposed method- ology provided results that reflect the influence of the pricing schemes over the corresponding market shares. Therefore, the incumbents can decide to divest activities and businesses that are characterized by low attractiveness and use the available finan- cial resources to invest in new product–market combinations thatcreate or sustain the competitive advantages of firms ( van Kranen- burg & Hagedoorn, 2008 ). Furthermore, customers are beginning to demand more telecommunications, information and media ser- vices in the form of one-stop-shopping ( Graack, 1996 ). Due to changing demand, alternative companies have become more attractive to customers and businesses when they are able to deli- ver a critical mass of connected customers and content providers ( Chacko & Mitchell, 1998 ). Future work includes development of suitable framework of corresponding methodologies, based on the other approaches of Lotka–Volterra model as well, in order to comprehensively study the different aspects of the telecommunication market, into the context of the theory of population biology. Such examples include the application of the ‘‘competing species’’ approach, in order to describe the evolution of the market after it reaches its equilibrium and the symbiosis model, in order to describe the enhancement of the growth rate of adoption in the case of complementary products or services. Moreover, the presented methodology can be extended by itself, so as to separately consider each market competitor as a predator preying on the dominant player, in order to describe in a more detailed level the structure of the market, the degree of com- petition and the market equilibrium.