Computational organization science: A new frontier

Synthetic adaptation is the process whereby any entity composed of intelligent, adaptive, and computational agents is also an intelligent, adaptive, and computational agent. Because of synthetic adaptation, organizations, like the agents of which they are composed, are inherently computational. We can gain insight into the behavior of groups, organizations, and societies by using multiagent computational models composed of collections of intelligent adaptive artificial agents. CONSTRUCT-O and ORGAHEAD are examples of such models whose value for social, organizational, and policy analysis lies in the fact that they combine a network (social and knowledge approach) with a multiagent approach to effect more realistic behavior. The results from a series of virtual experiments using these models are examined to illustrate the power of this approach for social, organizational, and policy analysis.