TITLE:
Dynamics of the Austrian Food Market: Application of Lotka-Volterra Differential Equations
AUTHORS:
Romana Bauer, Florian Schwarzmayr, Norbert Brunner, Manfred Kühleitner
KEYWORDS:
Conventional and Organic Products, Market Shares, Market Dynamics, Lotka-Volterra Models, Agrarmarkt Austria GmbH (AMA)
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Modelling and Simulation,
Vol.10 No.2,
April
25,
2022
ABSTRACT: The organic food market has become an important part of food industry. We
analyze sales data from Austria for 2014 to 2020 of 124 products from 25
product groups in six categories, each in conventional and organic form. We
fitted their market shares by means of a modified Lotka-Volterra model with
constant coefficients. When only organic and conventional products were
compared, a significant increase in market shares was observed for 15 of 25
organic product groups, indicating a continuing growth of the organic food
market. The typical Lotka-Volterra dynamics was a predator-prey dynamics with
an organic product (group) predating on conventional products that were in
symbiosis.