Chaos dans les ventes de biens à la mode et implication pour le contrôle de gestion

Objective - This article aims at showing that management control should drop cybernetic control for some activities of good sales. Study design - Reviewing Sutherland's (1975) and Hofstede's (1978) articles, it seems that activities of good sales can be controlled by a cybernetic control, like program-planning-budgeting systems. If sales of fashion goods were linear, like Miller et al.'s (1993) model, their forecasting would be possible and useful. However, two other models show that these sales could be chaotic (Granovetter and Soong ; Nakayama and Nakamura, 2004). In these models, the sales of fashion goods could be unpredictable beyond short intervals. The presence of chaotic patterns in this type of sales was thus tested. Data and methods - The long time series of video game hardware sales, from the data base of the www.vgchartz.com Internet website, were used. To test the presence of non-linearity, Brock et al.'s (1996) test was used after having stationnarized and removed linear dependencies. Then, to test the presence of chaotic patterns in these sales, the Lyapunov largest exponent and the correlation dimension were estimated. Results - The Japanese sales of video game hardware are chaotic. Their predictability horizons are limited to 6-9 weeks. Conclusion - The presence of chaos and thus of limited predictability horizon call into question the possiblity to predict these sales for one year and, as a conclusion, the cybernetic control process, like program-planning-budgeting systems.