Enterprise design through complex adaptive systems and efficiency measurement

Oscar Herrera-Restrepo and Konstantinos Triantis

European Journal of Operational Research, 2019, vol. 278, issue 2, 481-497

Abstract: Managerial policies affect enterprise operations facilitating or impeding the achievement of goals. Enterprises can operate individually or might also be part of a group of interconnected enterprises. For an enterprise operating as part of a (de)centralized group of enterprises with a similar or complementary mission and under the same or different ownership, the coordination of decisions and actions is important. Using the concept of network as an arrangement of interconnected nodes, this paper deals with enterprises as the members of a network, and with enterprise transactions as the connections among its members. We consider coordination exhibiting connectivity, feedback, and adaptation. These features are not only typical of enterprise networks, but also of complex adaptive systems (CAS). By considering enterprise networks as CAS, we study managerial policies that affect the coordination among the members of enterprise networks and the subsequent effect on technical efficiency both at the individual member enterprise and network levels. To approximate the effects of coordination-driven managerial policies, we consider flocking behavior from natural ecosystems, which the CAS literature studies, as a proxy for managerial policies. We simulate the relationships between managerial policies and technical efficiency in an enterprise network of deregulated power plants through an agent-based model. Experimental results inform when and how managerial policies enhance the coordination among network members and allow for the investigation of the relationships that exist between individual decisions and collective influences. These relationships result in an emergent goal seeking network behavior with respect to the goal of achieving technical efficiency.

Keywords: Data envelopment analysis; Enterprise design; Managerial policies; Efficiency measurement; Complex adaptive systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221718310245
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:278:y:2019:i:2:p:481-497

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2018.12.002

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().