An Exploring Study on Networked Market Disruption and Resilience

The main objective of this study is to explore the core of socially restrained buying trends of the agricultural foods and products made from Tohoku Area. Actually these cases mean that many people do feel something unfavorable and they are not going to buy foods made from Tohoku Area. And these trends are still often observable anywhere ever since the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster of the Tohoku Quake (11^th, Mar. 2011). Certainly, this social phenomenon is rational to understand the social anxiety and unsafely suspicions of naïve people for nuclear polluted contaminations within foods. Of course, these safety matters were temporally, but some consumers still feel unsafely sentiments now.

In this concern, I presume that these social trends are underlying in the information-asymmetry as the market for ‘Lemons’. And I define this presumption as an agent-based model on social cascading, social uncertainty, networked market disruptions and percolation process. As results of simulating runs, I clarified my hypotheses and these are possibly actualized in configured conditions. Namely I can conclude that the emergent cascading of socially restrained buying trends of agricultural foods made from Tohoku Area can be engendered by information-asymmetry as the market for ‘Lemons’, and its networked market is also crucially ruled in the percolation principle. Finally, I will show these details and discuss the relatives.