Abstract:

With the increasing popularity of Internet, many consumers search the information of an item on line before buying it. The search engines like Google and Baidu provide vehicle to capture and track the pre-purchase research behaviors. We design and construct a leading climate index of China's automobile demand based on the internet search volume data, namely “Google China Automobile Index”. Our index has strong forecasting power on the market demand. Meanwhile, we find that consumers’ pre-purchase research behavior has two stages, which is named as “U-shape” rule in this paper.

Key words: Search engine, Demand forecasting, Automobile, Pre-purchase research behavior, Leading index