His current research projects include the following:
Industry Dynamics: The objective of this project is to build a computational model of industry evolution which has the capacity to generate a large number of empirical regularities, and is rich enough to allow extensive comparative dynamics analyses involving various industry-specific factors. The current model entails an evolving population of myopic but adaptive firms engaged in knowledge-based competition with entry, exit, and R&D. Some preliminary results from this project have been reported in recent articles in Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination (2009) and Eastern Economic Journal (2011: a symposium issue on Agent-based Computational Economics).
Corporate Leniency Program and Cartels: In this project, Joseph E. Harrington, Jr. (Wharton - University of Pennsylvania) and I look at the impact the corporate leniency program has on the formation and sustainability of cartels in a population of industries. The ultimate objective is to evaluate the effectiveness of the program using a computational model in which the births and deaths of the cartels are fully endogenized. The base model involving a population of heterogeneous industries was presented in an analytical paper published in a recent issue of Journal of European Economic Association (2009).
Organizational Structure: This research examines how the
design of coordination and communication structures influences the dynamics
of individual and social learning in complex organizational systems. Recent work in this line explored the impact of
centralization and decentralization on the performance of co-evolving multi-unit
business firms in a competitive environment. The outcomes of this project have been published in a
number of refereed journals, including Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory (1997), Management Science (2000, 2003), and Journal of
Economic Dynamics and Control (2005). This project has evolved into an on-going project which explores the role of communication and information processing in endogenous hierarchies.
Endogenous Social Networks: This project investigates the dynamic structure
and performance of
social networks that emerge endogenously in a population of adaptive agents, when they are
engaged in the process of discovery through innovation and imitation. Various results from this line of research have been reported in American Journal of Sociology (2005), Organization Science (2007), and Advances in Complex Systems (2011).