Managing Change and the Success of Niche Products

This paper presents a model of a firm preparing to launch a product into a market where consumer preferences change over time and cannot be directly observed. Market research is used in order to determine what type of product to produce. The employees making decisions based on the market research data are of bounded rationality; hence, organizational structure plays a key role in the analysis of decision making. The implications for profits of the interactions of organizational structure and the stochastic environment are analyzed. Particular attention is paid to the choice of organizational size and profitability for niche appeal products and mass appeal products.