Journal of Intelligent Marketing Management

Journal of Intelligent Marketing Management

When the Market Buys from Itself: The Rise of Recursive Economies in Intelligent Ecosystems

Editor-in-Chief Lecture

Authors
Seyed Mohammad Sadegh Milani Hosseini 1
Mohammad Amin Torabi 2
Matineh Moghaddam 3
1 Ph.D. in Business Administration, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran; Department of Management, Nabi Akram Institute of Higher Education, Tabriz, Iran
2 Ph.D. in Business Administration, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran; Researcher, Amin Intelligent Management Research Group, Tehran, Iran
3 Department of Business Administration, Abrar Institute of Higher Education, Tehran, Iran; Researcher, Amin Intelligent Management Research Group, Tehran, Iran
JABM.3.2.15564.351256.3257.36620
Abstract
In the classical marketing tradition, the market has been a discovery mechanism for preferences: demand is the input and the firm's response is the output. This editorial argues that in contemporary intelligent ecosystems this direction has been reversed, giving rise to what we term the recursive economy: a condition in which demand signals, transacting actors, the product-validation process, and even the training data of next-generation models are all generated by the very intelligent systems that were supposed to discover demand. Adopting an interpretive–analytical method with abductive logic, the study draws on an interpretive systematic review of 21 works, 20 of which were published from 2025 onwards. Findings are organized into four levels of recursion: signal recursion (fabricated reviews and social proof), actor recursion (virtual influencers and simulated respondents), transaction recursion (agentic commerce in which the buyer is itself a model), and learning recursion (next-generation models trained on the market's own outputs). We argue that the central challenge is no longer information asymmetry in its classical sense but self-referential information, and that foundational marketing constructs such as electronic word of mouth, brand equity and loyalty now face a construct-validity crisis because their measurement channels have become endogenous. A three-criterion framework is proposed for separating legitimate intelligent marketing from recursive fabrication, and six research questions are put forward as an agenda for forthcoming issues.
Keywords
recursive economy
synthetic social proof
fabricated demand validation
agentic commerce
model collapse
intelligent marketing
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