The Computer Simulation of Partnership Formation

This paper is intended to present and apply a formal dependence model to a simulation study of partnership formation. Although the emergence and evolution of coalitions is an issue of major concern in the study of organisations, a number of questions are still laid open. How do coalitions emerge? Which processes and mechanisms are responsible for their evolution? The agents‘ informal communications, commitments and negotiations are considered as “given”, and none or poor effort is done to ground them upon the agents‘ self-interests. The philosophy underlying this paper is that the objective relationships of dependence among heterogeneous agents provide a fundamental ground for the emergence of spontaneous coalitions. As long as agents are endowed with different goals and heterogeneous competencies, a structure of social relationships, namely dependence relations, is likely to occur among them. A formal model of dynamic dependence relationships based on the agents‘ individual properties will be used to derive a further agents‘ property, namely their negotiation powers. Through computer simulation, this property will be used to predict how likely each agent in a population will form rewarding partnerships.