Several models of firm dynamics and economic
evolution have been developed recently based on empirical studies of industries.
Works by J.A.C. Baum an H. Rao (1999), A.Y. Lewin et al. (1999) and others investigate
on historical data how institutional, ecological, and strategic factors influence
firm performances and survival.
Complementing the empirical analysis of historical data,
other works intend to simulate the economic evolution (see for example H. Mizuta
and Y. Yamagat (2001), A. Lomi and E. R. Larsen (1996), D. A. Levinthal (1997),
E. Bruederer and J. Singh (1996), etc.). They often study a set of firms in
competition. They model the internal structure of firms, their decision process
and the various interactions and relations which exist between them.
However, no work, as far as we know, studies economic
models which represent explicitly firms and organizational forms and relationships
between them.
Multi-agent systems provide a good paradigm to model these
populations of evolutionary firms which are characterized by a collection of
entities, which interact in a dynamic environment.
This projet aims to define a more complete economic model
and a multi-agent simulation of this model. We thus propose an economic model
which integrates firms and organizational forms, and represents the various
relations between them: firm-firm, firm-form and form-firm. So, the model defines
the relation between: