Simulating Digital Businesses using an Agent Based Modeling approach

This paper proposes a complex systems approach to understand the growth and decline of Digital Businesses. Digital Businesses are characterised by unique factors such as a highly networked online customer base, where word of mouth spreads very fast, and minimal cost of incremental users due to economies of scale. Thus online businesses peak and plummet rapidly making it difficult to fathom their success. Through an Agent Based Modeling approach we propose that online businesses can be represented as simulation models which can enable forecasting, what-if analysis and optimization of business parameters.