Untangling the complexity of market competition in consumer goods—A complex Hilbert PCA analysis

Today’s consumer goods markets are rapidly evolving with significant growth in the number of information media as well as the number of competitive products. In this environment, obtaining a quantitative grasp of heterogeneous interactions of firms and customers, which have attracted interest of management scientists and economists, requires the analysis of extremely high-dimensional data. Existing approaches in quantitative research could not handle such data without any reliable prior knowledge nor strong assumptions. Alternatively, we propose a novel method called complex Hilbert principal component analysis (CHPCA) and construct a synchronization network using Hodge decomposition. CHPCA enables us to extract significant comovements with a time lead/delay in the data, and Hodge decomposition is useful for identifying the time-structure of correlations. We apply this method to the Japanese beer market data and reveal comovement of variables related to the consumer choice process across multiple products. Furthermore, we find remarkable customer heterogeneity by calculating the coordinates of each customer in the space derived from the results of CHPCA. Lastly, we discuss the policy and managerial implications, limitations, and further development of the proposed method.

Hodge decomposition of string topology

Let X be a simply connected closed oriented manifold of rationally elliptic homotopy type. We prove that the string topology bracket on the $S^1$ -equivariant homology $ {\overline {\text {H}}}_\ast ^{S^1}({\mathcal {L}} X,{\mathbb {Q}}) $ of the free loop space of X preserves the Hodge decomposition of $ {\overline {\text {H}}}_\ast ^{S^1}({\mathcal {L}} X,{\mathbb {Q}}) $ , making it a bigraded Lie algebra. We deduce this result from a general theorem on derived Poisson structures on the universal enveloping algebras of homologically nilpotent finite-dimensional DG Lie algebras. Our theorem settles a conjecture of [7].

Dolbeault cohomology of complex manifolds with torus action

We describe the basic Dolbeault cohomology algebra of the canonical foliation on a class of complex manifolds with a torus symmetry group. This class includes complex moment-angle manifolds, LVM- and LVMB-manifolds and, in most generality, complex manifolds with a maximal holomorphic torus action. We also provide a DGA model for the ordinary Dolbeault cohomology algebra. The Hodge decomposition for the basic Dolbeault cohomology is proved by reducing to the transversely Kähler (equivalently, polytopal) case using a foliated analogue of toric blow-up.