Guido Fioretti and Alessandro Lomi
An Agent-Based Representation of the Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 11 (1) 2008.
Abstract
Cohen, March and Olsen's Garbage Can Model (GCM) of organizational choice
represents perhaps the first and remains by far the most influential
agent-based representation of organizational decision processes. According
to the GCM organizations are conceptualized as crossroads of time-dependent
flows of four distinct classes of objects: 'participants', 'opportunities',
'solutions' and 'probnlems'. Collisions among the different objects generate
events called 'decisions'.
In this paper we use NetLogo to build an explicit agent-based representation
of the original GCM. We conduct a series of simulation experiments to
validate and extend some of the most interesting conclusions of the GCM. We
show that our representation is able to reproduce a number of properties of
the original model. Yet, unlike the original model, in our representation
these properties are not encoded explicitly, but emerge from general
principles of the Garbage Can decision processes.