No abstract

In recent years, the management literature has increasingly emphasized the importance of self-organization and “local action” in contrast to prior traditions of engineering control and design. While processes of self-organization are quite powerful, they do not negate the possibility of design influences. They do, however, suggest that a new set of design tools or concepts may be useful. We address this issue by considering the problem of landscape design—the tuning of fitness landscapes on which actors adapt. We examine how alternative organizational designs influence actors' fitness landscapes and, in turn, the behavior that these alternative designs engender. Reducing interdependencies leads to robust designs that result in relatively stable and predictable behaviors. Designs that highlight interdependencies, such as cross-functional teams, lead to greater exploration of possible configurations of actions, though at the possible cost of coordination difficulties. Actors adapt not only on fixed landscapes, but also on surfaces that are deformed by others' actions. Such coupled landscapes have important implications for the emergence of cooperation in the face of social dilemmas. Finally, actors' perceptions of landscapes are influenced by the manner in which they are framed by devices such as strategy frameworks and managerial accounting systems.

This working paper reports the main lines of discussion that developed during a fourday workshop held August 10-13, 1995, at the Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico. The workshop was devoted to exploring the difficulties and promise of current research on organizational routines and related concepts. We decided during the concluding day of our sessions that the productive conversations we had held could be quite valuable to others if we could craft an effective format for sharing them. Many of us were surprised, both by our points of agreement and disagreement, and all of us felt that arguments made during the discussions contributed novel and valuable linkages to results and methods in related fields. It was our sense that other researchers working on these issues could well benefit from an account of what was said. This working paper is therefore designed with the audience of fellow researchersand especially graduate studentschiefly in mind. It reorganizes (and compresses) the chronological flow of our discussions, in an effort to bring out major themes. In each of its sections it also contains commentary, pointers to literature, and items of dispute, all added by the participants as they reviewed the working paper draft. Some comments of one participant evolved into a much larger argument not easily sliced into separate chunks. So those appear as Appendix A. Thus the document distills not only the four days of discussion, but some reflections on those discussions during the few weeks following the meeting while the draft was created and circulated for commentary. ' The seven gathered at the workshop were drawn from only a subspace of the many researchers working with the concept of routine. All shared a commitment to viewing actors through the lens of research in cognitive psychology on short-term memory limits, reasoning powers, and differentiated forms of long term memory and learningan approach we will label "cognitive realism". All shared an approach to change processes in organizational systems as broadly evolutionary in their character ("an evolutionary approach to change"). All regarded as highly significant "political" and social forces within organizations, the many channels through which individual and local interests assert themselves at the expense of more global organizational concerns ("the diversity of "fitness" forces"). These common commitments probably contributed to the many points of agreement reached over the four days. Differences in emphasis between the three commitments probably account for many of the remaining points of contention. What follows is a synthetic reconstruction of the conversations, indicating both significant agreements and remaining open issues (marked with a *). Each section closes with remarks contributed by workshop participants during revision of this paper, and attributed directly to them via their initials. Those participants (with their identifying initials) were:

We investigate in a series of laboratory experiments how costs and benefits of linguistic communication affect the emergence of simple languages in a coordination task when no common language is available in the beginning. The experiment involved pairwise computerized communication between 152 subjects involved in at least 60 rounds. The subjects had to develop a common code referring to items in varying lists of geometrical figures distinguished by up to three features. A code had to be made of a limited repertoire of letters. Using letters had a cost. We are interested in the question of whether a common code is developed, and what enhances its emergence. Furthermore, we explore the emergence of compositional, protogrammatical structure in such codes. We compare environments that differ in terms of available linguistic resources (number of letters available) and in terms of stability of the task environment (variability in the set of figures). Our experiments show that a too small repertoire of letters causes coordination failures. Cost efficiency and role asymmetry are important factors enhancing communicative success. In stable environments, grammars do not seem to matter much, and instead efficient arbitrary codes often do better. However, in an environment with novelty, compositional grammars offer considerable coordination advantages and therefore are more likely to arise.communication ͉ compositionality ͉ economics of language A ccording to the linguist André Martinet, language is shaped ''by the permanent conflict between man's communicative needs and his tendency to reduce to a minimum his mental and physical activity'' (1). This means that the benefits of communication are compared with the memory and articulation costs of linguistic expression. A tendency toward the optimization of the difference between benefits and costs is postulated.Even if many contemporary linguists would disagree with Martinet's view, it is widely recognized that some sort of economizing principle is at work in shaping human language: for example, Chomsky's (2) ''minimalist program'' relies on assumptions of economy of derivation and representation, and on principles of least effort. However, he maintains that ''questions concerning abstract computational mechanisms are distinct from those concerning communication'' (3). Another interesting approach to language structure is optimality theory (4), which postulates a process of constraint satisfaction that guides the shaping of linguistic outputs.A recent, growing body of literature has exploited principles of communication effectiveness and efficiency to model, mathematically or by computer simulation, the emergence of grammatical languages from initial no communication (5-10). As will become apparent later, the basic models used in this literature have some resemblance with the structure of our experiments.Moreover, we should mention a long tradition of using principles of least effort to explain and model language statistical regularities like Zipf's law in word distribution ...

Much of human learning in a social context has an interactive nature: What an individual learns is affected by what other individuals are learning at the same time. Games represent a widely accepted paradigm for representing interactive decision-making. We explored the potential value of neural networks for modeling and predicting human interactive learning in repeated games. We found that even very simple learning networks, driven by regret-based feedback, accurately predict observed human behavior in different experiments on 21 games with unique equilibria in mixed strategies. Introducing regret in the feedback dramatically improved the performance of the neural network. We show that regret-based models provide better predictions of learning than established economic models