Sales Forecasting with the Aid of a Human Behavior Simulator

This article describes a recent application of simulation to a forecasting problem. The simulation was of the human behavior characteristics of a diverse group of retail dealers. The purpose of the simulation was to propose and test a new method of forecasting a manufacturer's sales to his retail dealers. A simulation model of dealer behavior was constructed and proved very effective in helping the manufacturer to generate good sales forecasts. Unsophisticated retailers were found to have a sufficiently systematic set of procedures to permit simulation of these procedures by a computer model and it was concluded that effective simulation of the human decision processes of a large non-homogeneous group of businessmen is possible.