•Competitive dynamics between multinational enterprises (MNEs)’s entry and local firms is examined.•The combination of the agent-based simulation model and the economic model of competition is ...applied.•MNEs’ entry firstly reduces the survival rate of local firms, and this effect is heightened by environment complexity, but diminishes over time.•Local firms with a broader knowledge search are better able to confront the negative impact of MNEs’ entry over time.•The negative effect of MNEs’ entry is weaker for local firms with a strong retrieval capacity.
This study examines the competitive dynamics between foreign and local firms. We posit that multinational enterprises (MNEs)’s entry in foreign markets significantly reduces the survival rate of local firms in the short term, but that this effect gradually diminishes over time. The proposed conceptual framework is operationalized through the combination of the widely used agent-based model and the economic model of competition. The agent-based model allows us to study the behavior of firms under the context of different markets and the environmental complexity while the competition model determines the competition between firms as well as the entry and exit of firms. Our results obtained from the simulation study reveal that the negative effect of foreign entry is heightened as environmental complexity increases. However, local firms with a broader knowledge search are better able to confront the negative impact of foreign entry over time. We also find that the negative effect of foreign entry on the survival of local firms is weaker for local firms with a strong retrieval capacity.
The present work addresses how seasonal environmental changes affect adaptation and evolutionary predictability in the presence of epistasis for finite-size populations. We assume gene regulation so ...that different seasons of the environment inflict selective pressures on different set traits each time. The existence of epistasis reduces modularity, and the subsets no longer evolve independently. We show that epistasis enhances oscillation in fitness despite decreased variation at the genotypic level, as revealed by an entropy analysis. Furthermore, the amplitude of oscillations increases with the period of the different phases. We also observe that demography plays a role, and larger populations are associated with larger oscillations and more efficient searches of local optima.
Co-innovation between digital platforms and complementors is motivated by their interactions, especially on content creation platforms that emphasise creativity. With the platform monopoly, creators ...are increasingly dependent on the platform thus making the interaction directional. As the long-term effect of the dependency effect on co-innovation under multi-agent networks is currently under-researched, a novel asymmetric NK model is proposed in this paper to evaluate creators' dependence on the platform through agent-based simulation. The results show that the internal interaction of creators has an inverted U-shaped effect on co-innovation, and the external dependency effect has a negative effect on co-innovation. Further results considering global complexity constraints show that there is a substitution effect between internal interaction and external dependency and that relying on a platform can facilitate co-innovation by reducing potential external risks under high environmental complexity. Moreover, exploratory innovation is equally conducive to co-innovation and enables creators to be less dependent. This study extends a new model for digital platform research and responds to discussions between interaction, exploration, and innovation in the literature.
Cooperative coevolutionary algorithms (CCEAs) divide a given problem in to a number of subproblems and use an evolutionary algorithm to solve each subproblem. This letter is concerned with the ...scenario under which a single fitness measure exists. By removing the typically used subproblem partnering mechanism, it is suggested that such CCEAs can be viewed as making use of a generalized version of the global crossover operator introduced in early evolution strategies. Using the well-known NK model of fitness landscapes, the effects of varying aspects of global crossover with respect to the ruggedness of the underlying fitness landscape are explored. Results suggest improvements over the most widely used form of CCEAs, something further demonstrated using other well-known test functions.
Ongoing product design has been defined as a complex problem solving task that is central for the development of new products. Despite its importance, existing work has mostly focused on studying how ...designers' creativity at the initial stages of design influences the development of radical innovations. However, the role of non-creativity related mechanisms at later stages is still not well understood. Our contribution is to analyze how motivational factors influence non-creative tasks in ongoing incremental design processes. We use an agent based simulation model in which designers improve an existing product by making design modifications based on customers' feedback on product attributes. Drawing on regulatory focus theory, we argue that designers' motivations (promotion focus vs prevention focus) influence the way they search for solutions. We find that, in complex tasks, customer feedback acts as a situational factor that biases designers' decisions, making promotion focused problem-solving more effective than prevention-focused one.
•Quasi-species dynamics is formulated as a Markov process in genotype space.•Quasi-species dynamics is shown to maximise genotypic reproductive value, and not fitness (reproductive rate) or flatness ...(mutational robustness).•A method to forecast quasi-species evolution from the topography of the landscape of reproductive values is outlined and illustrated with a simple example.
Growing efforts to measure fitness landscapes in molecular and microbial systems are motivated by a longstanding goal to predict future evolutionary trajectories. Sometimes under-appreciated, however, is that the fitness landscape and its topography do not by themselves determine the direction of evolution: under sufficiently high mutation rates, populations can climb the closest fitness peak (survival of the fittest), settle in lower regions with higher mutational robustness (survival of the flattest), or even fail to adapt altogether (error catastrophes). I show that another measure of reproductive success, Fisher’s reproductive value, resolves the trade-off between fitness and robustness in the quasi-species regime of evolution: to forecast the motion of a population in genotype space, one should look for peaks in the (mutation-rate dependent) landscape of genotypic reproductive values—whether or not these peaks correspond to local fitness maxima or flat fitness plateaus. This new landscape picture turns quasi-species dynamics into an instance of non-equilibrium dynamics, in the physical sense of Markovian processes, potential landscapes, entropy production, etc.
Organizations have widely begun to adopt remote working since the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the effect of remote work on team performance remains unknown. A multi-layer interaction system based on ...organizational systems theory was designed to assess how remote working affects team performance. Individual performance was computed using a positively skewed stochastic performance model and a modified NK model was used to simulate the team performance under specialized and collaborative conditions. The results showed a complex relationship between task complexity and remote rate and that collaborative teams require a higher remote rate when the probability of employees benefiting from remote work is low to avoid potential detriments from excessive competition. Further results considering agent heterogeneity suggest that individual-level gains are magnified or reduced at the team level and that assessing individual heterogeneity and task complexity is significant for designing remote strategies. In addition, differential mechanisms in team structure and the hierarchy of authority are discussed. This study presents the design and application of a novel business system that helps teams make optimal remote decisions in addition to responding to conflicting discussions in the literature and in practice and providing new insights into decision-making systems in a digital context.
Employee entrepreneurship and employee moves to rival firms (employee mobility) have both been recognized as critical drivers of the transfer of knowledge. Drawing on a unique database of ...intra-industry inventor entrepreneurship and mobility events in the U.S. semiconductor industry, I examine the effect of the complexity of inventors' prior patenting activities on their decisions to join a rival firm or found a start-up. The findings show that even though complexity inhibits knowledge diffusion to rival firms through employee mobility, complex knowledge may be underexploited within existing organizations and may still flow to startups through employee entrepreneurship. This study sheds new light on how technology shapes patterns of employee entrepreneurship and mobility, with implications for knowledge flows and competitive dynamics.
Two-sided platforms are gaining increasing attention in practice and as the subject of IS and management research. We explore an assumption of research and practice: that a platform's architecture ...needs to be decoupled so that producers can easily mix and match the platform's design elements (APIs, code libraries, process models, etc.) into apps that perform well competitively, and insulate the platform from skewed outcomes and low market performance. However, in practice, complete decoupling is not just difficult but almost impossible. Based on more than two million runs of an exploratory NK model in which producers use a platform's design space for the creation of apps, we generate several surprising insights. First, we show that tighter coupling may not necessarily be harmful depending on the producers' design strategies and the amount of constraints placed on design elements. Second, we observe that if moderate to tightly coupled platforms with optimizing producers focused exclusively on being competitive, platform performance is lower compared to platforms with satisficing producers who put a lower priority of being competitive because of other interests. This is surprising since optimizers are better suited to cope with the inherent uncertainty of coupling. Finally, moderately coupled platforms can outperform platforms with loose coupling when constraints nudge producers into distant design moves while also isolating them from downside uncertainty. These three findings offer implications for multiple streams of literature on platform architectures.
In the context of Wright’s adaptive landscape, genetic epistasis can yield a multipeaked or “rugged” topography. In an unstructured population, a lineage with selective access to multiple peaks is ...expected to fix rapidly on one, which may not be the highest peak. In a spatially structured population, on the other hand, beneficial mutations take longer to spread. This slowdown allows distant parts of the population to explore the landscape semiindependently. Such a population can simultaneously discover multiple peaks, and the genotype at the highest discovered peak is expected to dominate eventually. Thus, structured populations sacrifice initial speed of adaptation for breadth of search. As in the fable of the tortoise and the hare, the structured population (tortoise) starts relatively slow but eventually surpasses the unstructured population (hare) in average fitness. In contrast, on single-peak landscapes that lack epistasis, all uphill paths converge. Given such “smooth” topography, breadth of search is devalued and a structured population only lags behind an unstructured population in average fitness (ultimately converging). Thus, the tortoise–hare pattern is an indicator of ruggedness. After verifying these predictions in simulated populations where ruggedness is manipulable, we explore average fitness in metapopulations ofEscherichia coli. Consistent with a rugged landscape topography, we find a tortoise–hare pattern. Further, we find that structured populations accumulate more mutations, suggesting that distant peaks are higher. This approach can be used to unveil landscape topography in other systems, and we discuss its application for antibiotic resistance, engineering problems, and elements of Wright’s shifting balance process.
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