Forums de consommation sur Internet. Un modèle évolutionniste

The purpose of the model is to analyse the genesis and evolution of consumption oriented chat rooms in the Web space. We study an endogeneous consumption dynamics in which individuals make their buying decisions on the basis of a threefold information: their own consumption past experience (private information); an index of best sales (public information); advices that are available on evolutive Internet chat rooms (collective information). We discuss the properties of such a system as regards auto-organization: under which conditions chat rooms do they allow individual experiences to converge and aggregate into a genuine common knowledge leading to the emergence of an auto-organized pattern of consumption? Classification JEL : D1, D3, D7