Knowledge-Based Jobs and the Boundaries of Firms Agent-based simulation of Firms Learning and Workforce Skill Set Dynamics

The article explores how organisations learn to manage their skill endowments. By capitalising on the resource-based theory of the firm, we investigated incentives and bargaining processes giving raise to different organisational forms and different pattern of rents appropriation. We built an agent-based model to simulate a market where employees, bearing skills, bargain their salaries with firms that, by imitating successful competitors, learn how to select and reward employees. The simulation experiments suggest that, to explain emerging organisational forms, it is crucial to understand how environmental and institutional contexts drive different organisational learning processes and how, in turn, these latter may lead to self-reinforcing interlocking between skills and organisations.