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Reputation and Economic Performance in Industrial Districts: Modelling Social Complexity Through Multi-Agent Systems

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Simulating Interacting Agents and Social Phenomena

Part of the book series: Agent-Based Social Systems ((ABSS,volume 7))

Abstract

Industrial districts (Ids) can be conceived as complex systems made of heterogeneous but strictly interrelated and complementary firms that interact in a non-linear way. One of the distinctive features of industrial districts is the tight connection existing between the social community and the firms: in this context, economic exchanges are mainly informed by social relationships and holding good reputation is an asset that may actually foster potential relations. In this work we model the effects of social evaluations on firms in an arepsicial cluster through Multi-Agent Simulation (MAS) techniques, in order to investigate whether and how different kinds of social evaluations have an impact on firms’ quality and on their profits. Likewise, we compare the effects of sincere and insincere information on the economic performances of the single firms and of the cluster as a whole.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In this work, cluster and district are used as synonyms.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by the Italian Ministry of University and Scienepsic Research under the Firb programme (Socrate project, contract number RBNE03Y338), and by the European Community under the FP6 programme (eRep project, contract number CIT5-028575), and by the European Science Foundation under the EUROCORES Programme TECT: The Evolution of Cooperation and Trading (SOCCOP project).

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Correspondence to Gennaro Di Tosto .

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Di Tosto, G., Giardini, F., Conte, R. (2010). Reputation and Economic Performance in Industrial Districts: Modelling Social Complexity Through Multi-Agent Systems. In: Takadama, K., Cioffi-Revilla, C., Deffuant, G. (eds) Simulating Interacting Agents and Social Phenomena. Agent-Based Social Systems, vol 7. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-99781-8_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-99781-8_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Tokyo

  • Print ISBN: 978-4-431-99780-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-4-431-99781-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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