Modeling Consumer Behavior in a Market Economy

The article deals with the current topic of modernity – modeling of consumer behavior. The instability of a complex socio-psychological system, such as consumers, which is virtually impossible to completely study and understand, increases in the context of a market economy. Making adequate decisions requires a deep, comprehensive assessment of the situation and a reliable forecast of the course of events. A firm that has managed to correctly predict the situation receives an additional profit compared to the one that refrained from forecasting. A firm that made the wrong forecast loses the most. The present work considers the main consumer behavior models, as well as factors influencing decision-making, and consumers/ preferences. The authors carried out a comparative analysis of the consumer behavior models. The approaches used in the work were the cognition method, retrospective and documentary analysis, as well as synthesis, generalization, and systematization.