Estimating Product Cannibalisation in Wholesale using Multivariate Hawkes Processes with Inhibition

Abstract

Product cannibalisation in the marketplace refers to the decrease in the sales of one product due to competition from another product. We examine this phenomenon in a wholesale data set provided by an international company. We use a multivariate Hawkes process where each product is represented by a dimension, with cross-inhibition effects that model product cannibalisation. To implement the Hawkes process with inhibition we resolve challenges regarding the integration of the intensity function and introduce a new, stronger conditions for stability as existing conditions are unnecessarily strict under inhibition. We conduct our analysis in a Bayesian framework, for which we design a dimension-independent prior on the cross-inhibition based on a reparametrisation.