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E-commerce has dramatically reduced the limitation of space and time on economic activities, resulting in individuals having access to a huge number of consumers. In this paper, we propose a company’s optimal size decision model containing management costs as a means of investigating the evolution of the company size in e-commerce. Given that production decisions are made based on accessible market capacity, we explain how a company enters the market, and we draw an evolutionary path of the optimal company size. The results show that in the early expansion stage of accessible market capacity, a firm’s optimal size keeps increasing; after reaching a peak, the change in a firm’s optimal size depends on its cost management. When the accessible market capacity reaches a threshold, the firm will no longer be in the market, and may no longer exist. Finally, we construct a simulation framework based on complex adaptive systems to validate our proposed model. A simulation experiment confirms our model and reveals the dynamic co-evolution process of individual producers and firms.


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Analysis of a Firm’s Optimal Size Based on Accessible Market Capacity

Show Author's information Xiao SunJun QianYueting Chai( )Yi Liu
National Engineering Laboratory for E-Commerce Technologies, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Beijing 100084, China.

Abstract

E-commerce has dramatically reduced the limitation of space and time on economic activities, resulting in individuals having access to a huge number of consumers. In this paper, we propose a company’s optimal size decision model containing management costs as a means of investigating the evolution of the company size in e-commerce. Given that production decisions are made based on accessible market capacity, we explain how a company enters the market, and we draw an evolutionary path of the optimal company size. The results show that in the early expansion stage of accessible market capacity, a firm’s optimal size keeps increasing; after reaching a peak, the change in a firm’s optimal size depends on its cost management. When the accessible market capacity reaches a threshold, the firm will no longer be in the market, and may no longer exist. Finally, we construct a simulation framework based on complex adaptive systems to validate our proposed model. A simulation experiment confirms our model and reveals the dynamic co-evolution process of individual producers and firms.

Keywords: evolution, accessible market capacity, management cost, firm size

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Publication history

Received: 15 July 2019
Revised: 22 August 2019
Accepted: 09 September 2019
Published: 16 March 2020
Issue date: October 2020

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© The author(s) 2020

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Key Research & Development Program of China (No. 2017YFB1400104).

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The articles published in this open access journal are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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