More broadly, we are interested in how agents in such an economy can form or locate niche markets, rather than competing for the mass market, and in identifying the conditions needed for niches to appeal to producers. In general, niches appear to be associated with a firm's desire to learn about a consumer population (as opposed to exploiting current knowledge) and its willingness to forego some current profit in the hope of extracting larger profits in the future.
This involves both analytical work, in which we determine whether rational producers should choose to learn and identify the conditions needed for niches to be attractive to producers, and computational work, in which we characterize the behavior of adaptive producers within a parameterized model and study how changed in this model affect learnability and the desire to explore rather than exploit.