From Communication to Collaboration: Simulating the Emergence of Inter-organizational Collaboration Network

Abstract

Inter-organizational networks often have multiple dimensions, each one denoting a type of relationship. In this research, we studied how one dimension of the network, a collaboration network, emerges from organizations' interaction on another dimension--the communication network. We modeled the emergence of collaboration as an event-based multi-agent team formation process that incorporates the structure of the underlying communication network, the diffusion of project information, and network-based influence. As a case study, we used an agent-based simulation to study the collaboration among humanitarian organizations. We also analyzed how changes to the communication network among humanitarian organizations affect their collaboration network. The experiment results suggest that different strategies to promote communication may have positive or negative impacts on the future collaboration network.