Comments on "The Relationship between Diffusion Rates, Experience Curves, and Demand Elasticities for Consumer Durable Technological Innovations."

Traditionally, marketing scholars have focused their attention on demand analysis; that is, they have attempted to explain consumers' response to various marketing activities. By and large, the supply side, or the producer's problems, have been ignored. The Bass paper (this issue) is one of the first marketing studies to analyze both the consumer's and producer's problems. The analysis is within the context of the diffusion of new products. In this note I will synthesize the Bass work and comment on some of the assumptions which underlie it. The Bass (1969) model of the sales of new consumer durables can be equivalently represented as