The Emergence of Knowledge Exchange: An Agent-Based Model of a Software Market

Notwithstanding the warning of myopic view, when giving too much emphasis to the short run and stable environments, efficiency is usually claimed by standard economics as the main goal of competitive firms. This is challenged by management and organization scholars, who argue that, in presence of strong uncertainty due to environmental turbulence, slack resources can be a competitive advantage. In order to put some sound block in this debate through, this paper tests four groups of hypotheses on an agent-based model of industry competitiveness based on suppliers’ quality. It innovates current literature in two ways: first, it considers redundancy in terms of organizational knowledge, and not in terms of personnel or financial assets or other types of resources, which are usually taken as object of study. Secondly, it compares the effects of two forms of perturbations: environmental shock and opportunism. The results show that these two forms impact differently on industry profitability and that knowledge redundancy can (limitedly) compensate the effects of environmental shocks but not of opportunism. Moreover, it demonstrates that, as agents exchange (and accumulate) more information, knowledge efficiency declines, but less than proportionally to the increase of knowledge exchange.

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A MODEL OF DYNAMIC REWIRING AND KNOWLEDGE EXCHANGE IN R&D NETWORKS

Advances in Complex Systems ◽

10.1142/s0219525916500041 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 19 (01n02) ◽

pp. 1650004 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

MARIO V. TOMASELLO ◽

CLAUDIO J. TESSONE ◽

FRANK SCHWEITZER

Keyword(s):

Network Performance ◽

Formation Rate ◽

Knowledge Exchange ◽

Model Parameters ◽

Agent Based Model ◽

Knowledge Space ◽

Interaction Radius ◽

Agent Based ◽

Knowledge Stocks ◽

Alliance Partners

This paper investigates the process of knowledge exchange in inter-firm Research and Development (R&D) alliances by means of an agent-based model. Extant research has pointed out that firms select alliance partners considering both network-related and network-unrelated features (e.g., social capital versus complementary knowledge stocks). In our agent-based model, firms are located in a metric knowledge space. The interaction rules incorporate an exploration phase and a knowledge transfer phase, during which firms search for a new partner and then evaluate whether they can establish an alliance to exchange their knowledge stocks. The model parameters determining the overall system properties are the rate at which alliances form and dissolve and the agents’ interaction radius. Next, we define a novel indicator of performance, based on the distance traveled by the firms in the knowledge space. Remarkably, we find that — depending on the alliance formation rate and the interaction radius — firms tend to cluster around one or more attractors in the knowledge space, whose position is an emergent property of the system. And, more importantly, we find that there exists an inverted U-shaped dependence of the network performance on both model parameters.

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Knowledge Redundancy, Environmental Shocks, and Agents’ Opportunism

Global Business ◽

10.4018/978-1-60960-587-2.ch818 ◽

2011 ◽

pp. 2525-2553

Author(s):

Lucio Biggiero

Keyword(s):

Competitive Advantage ◽

Knowledge Exchange ◽

Environmental Turbulence ◽

Financial Assets ◽

Agent Based Model ◽

Agent Based ◽

Environmental Shock ◽

Short Run ◽

Environmental Shocks ◽

Object Of Study

Notwithstanding the warning of myopic view, when giving too much emphasis to the short run and stable environments, efficiency is usually claimed by standard economics as the main goal of competitive firms. This is challenged by management and organization scholars, who argue that, in presence of strong uncertainty due to environmental turbulence, slack resources can be a competitive advantage. In order to put some sound block in this debate through, this paper tests four groups of hypotheses on an agent-based model of industry competitiveness based on suppliers’ quality. It innovates current literature in two ways: first, it considers redundancy in terms of organizational knowledge, and not in terms of personnel or financial assets or other types of resources, which are usually taken as object of study. Secondly, it compares the effects of two forms of perturbations: environmental shock and opportunism. The results show that these two forms impact differently on industry profitability and that knowledge redundancy can (limitedly) compensate the effects of environmental shocks but not of opportunism. Moreover, it demonstrates that, as agents exchange (and accumulate) more information, knowledge efficiency declines, but less than proportionally to the increase of knowledge exchange.

Download Full-text