Agent-based simulation in management and organizational studies: a survey

Abstract

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation.*Related content and download information correct at time of download. Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive survey of the literature about the use of agent-based simulation (ABS) in the study of organizational behavior, decision making, and problem-solving. It aims at contributing to the consolidation of ABS as a field of applied research in management and organizational studies. Design/methodology/approach -The authors carried out a non-systematic search in literature published between 2000 and 2016, by using the keyword "agent-based" to search through Scopus' business, management and accounting database. Additional search criteria were devised using the papers' keywords and the categories defined by the divisions and interest groups of the Academy of Management. The authors found 181 articles for this survey.Findings -The survey shows that ABS provides a robust and rigorous framework to elaborate descriptions, explanations, predictions and theories about organizations and their processes as well as develop tools that support strategic and operational decision making and problem-solving. The authors show that the areas that report the highest number of applications are operations and logistics (37 percent), marketing (17 percent) and organizational behavior (14 percent). Originality/value -The paper illustrates the increasingly prominent role of ABS in fields such as organizational behavior, strategy, human resources, marketing and logistics. To-date, this is the most complete survey about ABS in all management areas.

Social cognitive theory and women’s career choices: an agent—based model simulation

“…The purpose of this study is to use agent-based modeling to simulate Bandura's triadic causation relationship between personal factors, behavioral patterns, and environmental events in the context of career occupation choices. Given that Bandura's model conceptualizes agency as a construct that emerges from the triadic causation model of interaction, agent-based modeling offers a suitable vehicle for simulation since the most distinctive feature of agent-based models (ABMs) is that they explicitly model interactions between different components (Gómez-Cruz Nelson et al 2017). Unlike other modeling tools, ABMs do not attempt to model system-wide properties.…”

Modeling the Adoption and Diffusion of Mobile Telecommunications Technologies in Iran: A Computational Approach Based on Agent-Based Modeling and Social Network Theory

“…ABMs show how simple behavioral rules of agents and local interactions among them at a micro-scale can create surprisingly complex patterns at a macro-scale. This methodology has gained an increasing popularity, both in academia and industry such as the study of critical infrastructures dependence [22], consumption of services of sustainable eco-systems [23], economic sciences [24,25], and management [26,27]. For adoption and diffusion studies, a number of works have used ABM for studying the adoption and diffusion of technologies such as environmental technologies [28], energy technologies [29], health and medical technologies [30][31][32], agricultural technologies [33], cinema technologies [34], transportation technologies [35], electricity production [36], alternative fuels [37,38], organic farming practices [39], automobile markets [40], fuel cell vehicles [41,42], mobile phone [43], and smart metering [44].…”

Agent-based modeling and simulation to assess flood preparedness and recovery of manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises

“…In the context of flood risk management, agent-based models (ABMs) have been used to model evacuation strategies involving agents representing individual members of the public (Dawson, Peppe, & Wang, 2011;Liu, Okada, Shen, & Li, 2010). In addition, ABMs have been utilised to evaluate flood communication strategies on individuals (Haer, Botzen, & Aerts, 2016), analyse the influence of individual behaviour on community flood risk (Tonn & Guikema, 2017), investigate the role of individuals' use of social media in relation to flood evacuation (Du, Cai, Sun, & Minsker, 2017), assess individual household flood response preferences (Yang, Scheffran, Süsser, Dawson, & Chen, 2018) and examine the dynamic evolution of flood risk and vulnerability of homeowners (Dubbelboer, J., Nikolic, J., Jenkins, K., Hall, 2017;Jenkins, Surminski, Hall, & Crick, 2017) In terms of modeling businesses, a recent survey of the use of agent-based simulation in management and organizational studies revealed the highest number of applications being in the areas of operations and logistics, marketing and organizational behaviour (Gómez-Cruz, Loaiza Saa, & Ortega Hurtado, 2017). Beyond the areas reported in this survey, agent-based approaches have been used to study business related issues such as the dynamic formation of supply chains (Wang, Wang, Vogel, Kumar, & Chiu, 2009), cost collaborative management in supply chains (Fu & Fu, 2015) and the collaboration duration of supply chains (Arvitrida, Tako, Robertson, & Robinson, 2017).…”