Aggressive or conservative, general or specific? A study of organizations adopting different learning strategies in an artificial world

An increasing growth of keen competitions among global industries greatly challenges present organizations (companies). The purpose of this study is to construct a computer simulation system for investigating the effects of organizations adopting different learning strategies on the change in consumer market share. The system constructed is an abstract model that captures some general features of consumers and organizations as well as their interactions in the real world, which constitutes an artificial world. It has four major modules: consumers, organizations, fitness evaluation, and organizational learning. These modules, including their interactions, are linked through the discrete-event simulation techniques. Experimental results show that different organizational learning strategies are better suited for different environments or the same environment at different times. Organizational learning provides organizations a chance of undergoing transformation to better meet consumers’ needs. However, it is risky to blindly adopt an aggressive learning strategy when the environment (market) is not stable. Instead, it may be better to adopt a conservative learning strategy.