Competitive dynamics of e-commerce web sites

The characteristic of “rich gets richer” is much more conspicuous on the Internet, which is the important cause of “power-law” characteristic of the “winner-takes-all” markets. A competitive model of e-commerce web sites is presented in order to explore the effects of competition and the characteristic of “rich gets richer” on Internet economy, and also to investigate how the “winner-takes-all” phenomenon comes forth. Then these ordinary differential equations are qualitatively analyzed and numerically simulated to study the dynamics of competition. The effects of parameters on the dynamic behavior in the model are also discussed.