Stakes or garlic? Studying the emergence of dominant designs through an agent-based model of a vampire economy

Real-life examples have demonstrated that technological advantages might not be sufficient to establish a leading market position. Insights into the emergence of a so-called dominant design are therefore not only of academic interest but are also of practical relevance. In the past, the paths leading toward a dominant design have typically been examined ex-post by means of case studies, which obviously limits the ability to systematically analyze factors that might play a role in these formation processes. In contrast, agent-based modeling and simulation, a relatively new method, is particularly well suited for the systematic investigation of these complex processes as it allows for variation of the parameters describing the market under consideration followed by observation of the corresponding system behavior. In this paper, we will demonstrate the ability of an agent-based approach to simulate the emergence of dominant designs in a hypothetical application taken from the world of vampires, in which humans must choose weapons to defend themselves against assaults from their supernatural adversaries. This setting makes it possible to test the effectivity of various measures, such as advertising or providing opportunities to practice, aimed at supporting market diffusion of the respective weapons. It turns out that technologically superior alternatives often, but not always, succeed in becoming the dominant design and that applying certain measures (and countermeasures) can indeed significantly influence this outcome.