Abstract
Agent-based modeling (ABM) is a simulation paradigm to model complex systems by defining heterogeneous individual-level behaviors in a bottom-up approach. ABM is typically employed to simulate markets to study consumer decisions and to see how consumers make their purchase decisions. In this work, we present a marketing ABM where consumer perceptions are modeled using 2-tuple fuzzy linguistic variables. These variables represent the opinions the consumers have on the different features of every product, which drive their decisions (e.g., price or quality). In contrast to numerical or crisp values, fuzzy linguistic variables are a realistic representation of these qualitative aspects. In our ABM, agents use a decision-making heuristic to select a product, which is based on those perceptions and a probabilistic utility maximization rule. This process requires a fuzzy aggregation of the perceptions of every product, based on an ordered weighted average (OWA). In addition, consumers can be aware or unaware of each product in the market. In our ABM, we model this information by introducing a brand awareness filter when applying the decision-making heuristic. Thus, consumer agents can only select those products they are aware of. Our experimental results show that our realistic representation of the consumer preferences is more accurate than other existing approaches.