Estimating population ecology models for the WWW market: evidence of competitive oligopolies.

This paper proposes adapting a particle filtering algorithm to model online Spanish real estate and job search market segments based on the Lotka-Volterra competition equations. For this purpose the authors use data on Internet information searches from Google Trends to proxy for market share. Market share evolution estimations are coherent with those observed in Google Trends. The results show evidence of low website incompatibility in the markets analyzed. Competitive oligopolies are most common in such low-competition markets, instead of the monopolies predicted by theoretical ecology models under strong competition conditions.