| Summary: | 博士 === 國立交通大學 === 工業工程與管理系所 === 105 === his research develops a sales forecasting model that can analyze the interaction effects of two retail competing formats (Convenience-oriented vs. Budget-oriented formats). A traditional approach to making such a forecast is based on the Lotka–Volterra equations (also called the LV-model). The LV-model assumes that the population of each species is affected by its self-growth, internal interaction within the species, and external interaction with other species. Most prior studies in business applications directly use sales data as input to the LV-model. The prior approach may result in misleading conclusions when sales data are embedded with seasonal variation, because this variation is not addressed in the original development of the LV-model. Therefore, this study proposes a forecasting framework (an enhanced application of the LV-model). The sales data of each retail format is considered as a compound data, which is decomposed into three individual components: (1) aggregate, (2) competition, and (3) seasonal components. The LV-model is used to forecast the competition component；the other two components are forecasted by typical time series methods；and the data of three components are finally combined into one. Empirical study indicates that the proposed method substantially outperforms the prior approach in terms of forecasting errors (4.4% vs.16.7% for Convenience-oriented and 5.8% vs. 16.2% for Budget-oriented). In addition, the proposed method reveals a more convincing predator-prey relationship between the two retail formats, which concludes that the Convenience-oriented is the predator. To the opposite, the prior approach, concluding that the Budget-oriented is the predator, is quite doubtful because the Convenience-oriented shall be preferred while the GDP grows over time. This research makes a contribution in how to appropriately apply the LV-model in forecasting revenue and analyzing the interaction effects of two competing business species.
Keywords : Lotka–Volterra model ; Forecasting ; Retail formats
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