Evolutionary dynamics of sales agents' promotional effort on small-world networks

In reality, manufacturers motivate sales agents to increase promotional effort with the sales rebate and penalty contract, the agents always concern about the fairness, and information flow structure among agents is a small-world network. In order to improve incentive performance under this situation, this paper builds a multi-agent model mainly to observe the impact of small-world network characteristics on incentive effects. Experimental results show that greater probability of replacement comparison objects will induce lower profit and products sales volume of the manufacturer; agents will have a huge negative impact on incentive effects when they get related information from a very small amount of agents. The aim of this paper is to provide suggestions for manufacturers to utilize the characteristic of small-world network rational so as to improve the incentive effect.