Interacting locally and evolving globally: A computational approach to the dynamics of organizational populations

We present a computational model of organizational evolution according to which the global dynamics of organizational populations emerge from simple rules of local interaction among individual organizations. Under a variety of simulated evolutionary conditions, the model's behavior is in qualitative agreement with empirical observations of actual organizational populations. Estimates on the synthetic data are compared with those obtained by empirical studies of founding processes. The key insight is that the density-dependence theory is consistent with many microprocesses that regulate the birth, survival, and death of individual organizations. However, the population-level relationship between density and organizational vital rates is highly sensitive to the range and rules of local interaction among individual organizations.