A Co-evolutionary Research For The Strategy And Institution Of The Firm

A co-evolutionary proposition about firm heterogeneity is proposed in this dissertation. The following four issues are tackled:1) a explanatory framework of the firm co-evolution covering cognition, strategy, governance and ecosystem is presented; 2)the generating processes of mutation of knowledge are demonstrated, and that origins of the firm heterogeneity evolution are different in cognitional synergies is revealed;3)the co-evolutionary processes of replication, transmission and adaptation about mutant knowledge are demonstrated;4)some co-evolutionary stylized facts are induced and compared, so that synergic level of the firm system can be measured and examined. The main conclusion is that mutation in knowledge (genotype) causes changes in strategies and governances (phenotype), and as differences of inter-firm governance efficiencies, which is realized through internal strategic transmitting, replicating and external adaptive processes of the mutant knowledge, are accumulated to a certain critical point, the transformation in structures and natures of evolutionary agents and its population may occur and the firm may get into new evolutionary trajectories. The main methods comprise the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), coordination game, firm fitness dynamics, population game model, and the features matching and inductive and comparative approaches. The main creative viewpoints comprise:1) a new view about the firm institutional and strategic research is explored by integrating institutional views and strategic views with evolutionary views and by integrating ontogeny with phylogeny, so as to research the processes and mechanisms of co-evolution covering subsystems in the firm and its ecosystem;2) AHP evaluating technique and coordination game approaches are applied to demonstrating mechanisms of cognitional synergies and knowledge evolution in strategic decisions and implementation, include the knowledge mutation mechanisms and internal section mechanisms; 3) general evolutionary models of agent and population are improved so as to reveal the natures of co-evolution, and evolution of governance efficiency of the firm and evolutionary game of population are explanted in the view of co-evolutions among mutation, transmission, replication and adaptation in knowledge, so that real evolution becomes possible.