We describe when and how to use simulation methods in theory development. We develop a roadmap that describes theory development using simulation and position simulation in the “sweet spot ” between theory-creating methods, such as multiple case inductive studies and formal modeling, and theory-testing methods. Simulation strengths include internal validity and facility with longitudinal, nonlinear, and process phenomena. Simulation’s primary value occurs in creative experimentation to produce novel theory. We conclude with evaluation guidelines. Simulation is an increasingly significant methodological approach to theory develop-ment in the literature focused on strategy and

I argue that research on organizational configurations has been limited by a mis-match between theory and methods and introduce set-theoretic methods as a viable alternative for overcoming this mismatch. I demonstrate the value of such methods for studying organizational configurations and discuss their applicability for examining equifinality and limited diversity among configurations, as well as their relevance to other research fields such as complementarities theory, complexity theory, and the resource-based view. The study of organizational configurations, broadly defined as “any multidimensional con-stellation of conceptually distinct characteris-tics that commonly occur together ” (Meyer, Tsui, & Hinings, 1993: 1175), has occupied an impor-tant and central role in both organization theory

In this paper, we examine the emergence of resources. Our analysis of technological capabil-ity acquisition by global U.S.-based chemical firms shows that the emergence of resources is inherently evolutionary. We find that path-creating search that generates resource heterogeneity is a response to idiosyncratic situations faced by firms in their local searches. Two such idiosyn-cratic situations—technology exhaustion and expansion beyond national markets—trigger firms in our sample to create unique innovation search paths. We also find that along a given path firms experiment in order to find the correct investment—in fact, some organizations seem to take a step backward for two steps forward—further demonstrating the evolutionary nature of the resource creation process. Copyright 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The resource-based view of the firm is one of the most prominent theoretical perspectives in strate-gic management (Wernerfelt, 1984; Barney, 1991; Teece, Pisano, and Shuen, 1997; Eisenhardt and

We use an innovative technique to examine an enduring but recently neglected question: How do environmental turbu-lence and complexity affect the appropriate formal design of organizations? We construct an agent-based simulation in which multidepartment firms with different designs face environments whose turbulence and complexity we control. The model’s results produce two sets of testable hypotheses. One set pinpoints formal designs that cope well with three different environments: turbulent settings, in which firms must improve their performance speedily; complex environments, in which firms must search broadly; and settings with both turbulence and complexity, in which firms must balance speed and search. The results shed new light on longstanding notions such as equifinality. The other set of hypotheses argues that the impact of individual design elements on speed and search often depends delicately on specific powers granted to department heads, creating effects that run contrary to conventional wisdom and intuition. Ample processing power at the bottom of a firm, for instance, can slow down the improvement and narrow the search of the firm as a whole. Differences arise between our results and conventional wisdom when conventional thinking fails to account for the powers of department heads—powers to withhold information about departmental options, to control decision-making agendas, to veto firmwide alternatives, and to take unilateral action. Our results suggest how future empirical studies of organizational design might be fruitfully coupled with rigorous agent-based modeling efforts.

gratefully acknowledged. We thank Jan Rivkin, Nicolaj Siggelkow, Linda Argote, the Associate Editor, and three anonymous reviewers for detailed and helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Errors and omissions remain our own. 2

We consider organizations that optimally choose the level of adapta-tion to a changing environment when coordination among specialized tasks is a concern. Adaptive organizations provide employees with flexibility to tailor their tasks to local information. Coordination is maintained by limiting specialization and improving communication. Alternatively, by letting employees stick to some preagreed action plan, organizations can ensure coordination without communication, re-gardless of the extent of specialization. Among other things, our the-ory shows how extensive specialization results in organizations that ignore local knowledge, and it explains why improvements in com-munication technology may reduce specialization by pushing orga-nizations to become more adaptive. I.

We examine how firms discover effective competitive positions in worlds that are both novel and complex. In such settings, neither rational deduction nor local search is likely to lead a firm to a successful array of choices. Analogical reasoning, however, may be helpful, allowing managers to transfer useful wisdom from similar settings they have experienced in the past. From a long list of observable industry characteristics, analogizing managers choose a subset they believe distinguishes similar industries from different ones. Faced with a novel industry, they seek a familiar industry which matches the novel one along that subset of characteristics. They transfer from the matching industry high-level policies that guide search in the novel industry. We embody this conceptualization of analogy in an agent-based simulation model. The model allows us to examine the impact of managerial and structural characteristics on the effectiveness of analogical reasoning. With respect to managerial characteristics, we find, not surprisingly, that analogical reasoning is especially powerful when managers pay attention to characteristics that truly distinguish similar industries from different ones. More surprisingly, we find that the marginal returns to depth of experience diminish rapidly while greater breadth of experience steadily improves performance. Both depth and breadth of experience are useful only when one

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At its core, a behavioral theory of choice has two fundamental attributes that distinguish it from traditional economic models of decision-making. One attribute is that choice sets are not available ex-ante to actors but must be constructed. This notion is well established in our models of learning and adaptation. The second fundamental postulate is that the evaluation of alternatives is likely to be imperfect. Despite the enshrinement of the notion of bounded rationality in the organizations literature, this second postulate in fact has been largely ignored in our formal models of learning and adaptation. We develop a structure with which to capture the imperfect evaluation of alternatives at the individual level and then explore the implications of alternative organizational structures, comprising such individual actors, on organizational decision-making. *University of Southern Denmark

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