Project Description

Agent-Based Modeling of the Formation of a Firm

Goal: Demonstrate how agents can fall into patterns of behavior which enable them to prosper together in a collection which may be called a firm. This project is motivated, in part, by Ronald Coase's question: "Why do people form firms?"

Premises:

• A firm succeeds because it, acting as an orchestrated whole, can exploit resources in its environment which none of its individual members could have exploited by acting alone.
• Action in a firm is orchestrated through rules. The rules in a firm guide the choices of its members.
• Rule-based decisions are more efficient than market-negotiated decisions -- in those contexts in which firms succeed -- because the rule-based decisions have lower transactions costs.

About the Investigator

Richard O. Hammer, presently a Java software developer, first coded agents in the early 1980s as a graduate student in computer science. Since the early 1980s he has worked mostly in other fields, business and non-profit management. But in the interim, between the 1980s and the present resumption of this research, he has described the questions which motivate this research in occasional publications. See for instance his paper, An Engineer's View of Morality, Set in a Model of Life

Contact information

Email: Richard.O.Hammer@gmail.com
Web page: richard-o-hammer.org
Telephone, voice only: 919-732-8366
Postal address: 111 West Corbin Street, Hillsborough, North Carolina 27278, USA