This paper studies an organizational architecture that I call information-age architecture. I define a measure of organizational IQ and test whether it is related to financial and market success using data from the fast-moving information technology industry. Higher organizational IQ is...

Using a comprehensive database of American prisoners of war during World War II, we find that survival from captivity generally declines as the hierarchy of a prisoner's group becomes steeper or more closely matches the military's established hierarchy. There is no evidence that survival is...

This paper describes a simple set of coordination structures that model certain kinds of information processing involved in organizations and markets. Four generic coordination structures are defined: product hierarchies, functional hierarchies, centralized markets, and decentralized markets....

A computational model of a retail chain is developed in which store managers continually search for better practices. Search takes place over a rugged landscape defined over the space of store practices. The main objective of this research is to determine how the amount of discretion given to...

The interplay between organizational structure, the decisions made by agents within the structure, and the technology supporting those agents is an important and complex, but not well understood, phenomenon in modern organizational studies. In this paper we describe how simulating key aspects of...

We examine how and why elements of organizational design depend on one another. An agent-based simulation allows us to model three design elements and two contextual variables that have rarely been analyzed jointly: a vertical hierarchy that reviews proposals from subordinates, an incentive...

The aim of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, it seeks to compare the efficacy of the Malaysian integrated population (i.e., integration of family planning with health) program with its categorial family planning counterpart. Secondly, it attempts to identify the organizational factors and the...

In an earlier issue of Management Science, Thomas Malone (1987) utilizes the concept of vulnerability costs in order to compare the degree of flexibility exhibited by markets and hierarchies. The purpose of this note is to redefine the concept of vulnerability to include the corresponding...

Information technology can link geographically separated people and help them locate interesting or useful resources. These attributes have the potential to bridge gaps and unite communities. Paradoxically, they also have the potential to fragment interaction and divide groups. Advances in...

Product architecture and organizational communication play significant roles in complex product development efforts. By using networks to characterize both product structure and communication patterns, we examine the impact of mismatches between these on new product development (NPD)...