Simulating an Ecosystem of Power: Conversion, Capacity and Strategic Action across Institutional Ecosystems

Power is commonly inserted into simulations as a stock: money, market share, military assets, legal authority, industrial capacity or network centrality. This representation is convenient and usually wrong for strategic inquiry. An actor may possess resources yet remain unable to convert them into effects; another may own few assets but control the standards, interfaces, certifications, financing sequences or coalitions through which everybody else must act. Power is therefore neither a thing nor a single relation. It is an ecosystem property: a differential capacity to make a possible course of action feasible, legitimate, financeable, interoperable and durable while imposing costs, delays or dependencies on competing courses of action. Ecosystem power can be simulated by treating standards, finance, innovation, procurement, law, industrial organisation and strategic adaptation as coupled conversion mechanisms. Resources must be distinguished from capabilities, capabilities from options, and options from realised effects. Actors are represented as portfolios of conversion capacities embedded in dependency networks and governed by institutional rules. Four operators structure the analysis: access, conversion, coordination and closure. Their interaction explains why nominally similar actors produce unequal outcomes and why interventions that increase a local resource can reduce system-level autonomy. A hybrid architecture combines multilayer networks, stock-flow relations, option valuation, event-driven rules and adaptive agents. It is designed for comparative experiments rather than point prediction. Its central output is a capacity differential: the change in the set of actions that an actor or coalition can credibly execute under specified time, legitimacy, financing and interoperability constraints. Within the action loop from representation to decision, transformation and renewed representation, ecosystem power supplies the redistribution-of-capacities function.