Yet another look at temporal aggregation in diffusion models of first-time purchase

Abstract

This paper gives yet another look at the impact of temporal aggregation on the parameter estimates for the familiar Bass diffusion model. It is shown that aggregation leads to larger values of the innovation parameter p and that it is leads to smaller values of the imitation parameter q, at least in theory. The last finding is in contrast with the results in Technological Forecasting and Social Change [51 (1996) 265]. We use simulation experiments to substantiate our results.