Abstract:

The effectiveness of three commonly used methodologies for market size estimation, as well as their accuracy in explaining the future behavior of the automobile market in Ecuador, is addressed in this presentation. These methodologies are Delphi forecast based on local expertise, Cross sectional linear regression, and Time series modeling of sales. Data of car sales ranging between 1990 and 2009 was used to compare the performance of these three methodologies. We found that Experto Forecast performs very well in the short term, while Time Series Modelling fits better the behavior of the market for medium term predictions.