A variation of the Minority Game has been applied to study the timing ofpromotional actions at retailers in the fast moving consumer goods market. Theunderlying hypotheses for this work are that price promotions are moreeffective when fewer than average competitors do a promotion, and that apromotion strategy can be based on past sales data. The first assumption hasbeen checked by analysing 1467 promotional actions for three products on theDutch market (ketchup, mayonnaise and curry sauce) over a 120-week period, bothon an aggregated level and on retailer chain level. The second assumption was tested by analysing past sales data with theMinority Game. This revealed that high or low competitor promotional pressurefor actual ketchup, mayonnaise, curry sauce and barbecue sauce markets is tosome extent predictable up to a forecast of some 10 weeks. Whereas a randomguess would be right 50% of the time, a single-agent game can predict themarket with a success rate of 56% for a 6 to 9 week forecast. This number isthe same for all four mentioned fast moving consumer markets. For a multi-agentgame a larger variability in the success rate is obtained, but predictabilitycan be as high as 65%. Contrary to expectation, the actual market does the opposite of what gametheory would predict. This points at a systematic oscillation in the market.Even though this result is not fully understood, merely observing that thistrend is present in the data could lead to exploitable trading benefits. As acheck, random history strings were generated from which the statisticalvariation in the game prediction was studied. This shows that the odds are1:1,000,000 that the observed pattern in the market is based on coincidence.
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