On product cannibalization. A new Lotka-Volterra model for asymmetric competition in the ICTs

Product cannibalization is a well known phenomenon in marketing and new product development and describes the case when one product steals sales from a product pertaining to the same brand. In this paper we present a new Lotka-Volterra model with asymmetric competition, which is useful to describe cases of product cannibalization. We apply the model to the case of Apple Inc, where iPhone sales concurred to determine the crisis of the iPad. Stimulated by this applied case, we studied a dfferent representation of the proposed LV model, which allows to reduce the involved parameters and helps understand whether the entrance of a second competitor alters the timing of maximum peak of the first.