The adoption of new products which mainly spread through word-of-mouth (such as fax machines, skype, facebook, Ipad, etc.) is one of the key problems in Marketing research. Ideally, given the sales data of the first few months, one would like to be able to predict both the future sales and the overall market potential.

In this talk I will first present the classic Bass model and the agent-based approach for the adoption of new products. Then, I will present some recent analytic results on the effect of the social network on the adoption of new products.

This is joint work with Ro'i Gibori and Eitan Muller