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

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 artificial 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.