On Strategic Choice and Organizational Ambidexterity: An agent-based modeling approach

Organizational ambidexterity, defined as the simultaneous pursuit of exploitation and exploration, has become a very important topic in the study of organizations. Yet, as a recent and comprehensive review notes, “Despite the rapidly expanding number of studies referring to organizational ambidexterity, empirical tests of the ambidexterity–performance relationship remain scarce.” The contribution of this paper is to introduce an agent-based model that captures many of the key aspects and tradeoffs, which have been identified in the literature, of the exploration–exploitation dilemma faced by firms. When data become available, the model can be calibrated to the data. Until then, the model serves as a useful tool for exploring hypotheses and revealing surprising aspects of the subject.