Sales Distribution of Consumer Electronics

TL;DR

This study analyzes daily consumer electronics sales in Japan, revealing that sales follow both lognormal and power-law distributions depending on market conditions, driven by underlying multiplicative processes.

Contribution

It demonstrates the dynamic switching between lognormal and power-law sales distributions and links these to different underlying multiplicative processes.

Findings

Sales follow lognormal and power-law distributions depending on market state.

Switches between distributions occur frequently.

Underlying sales dynamics differ between the two distributions.

Abstract

Using the uniform most powerful unbiased test, we observed the sales distribution of consumer electronics in Japan on a daily basis and report that it follows both a lognormal distribution and a power-law distribution and depends on the state of the market. We show that these switches occur quite often. The underlying sales dynamics found between both periods nicely matched a multiplicative process. However, even though the multiplicative term in the process displays a size-dependent relationship when a steady lognormal distribution holds, it shows a size-independent relationship when the power-law distribution holds. This difference in the underlying dynamics is responsible for the difference in the two observed distributions.