A word-of-mouth model is constructed for the growth of a church through enthusiasts, a subset of the church members who are active in recruitment. Two mechanisms for the source of new enthusiasts are proposed: new converts, and existing church members through a process called renewal. The conversion and renewal processes are compared and policies that could enhance the growth of a church are analysed. It was found that renewal is able to lower the epidemiological threshold present in the conversion process making rapid revival growth easier to achieve, even when that conversion process is inadequate. This is in part due to the expanding network of contacts a growing church produces that can enhance the renewal process. Policies to foster church growth centre on encouraging renewal, even at the expense of traditional evangelism. Some re-grouping of churches is suggested in order to attain critical masses of enthusiasts and church members that could tip a church into growth.
The purpose of the paper is to provide a formal representation of the so-called rat race, in which the major question is whether rats should go with the flow or deviate from common behaviour. With the help of a didactic system dynamics model, various concepts from business, investment, and personal career strategies can be explained and their quantitative requirements can be determined. In an eclectic fashion, the paper draws on many scientific concepts, of which some have become widely known lately because of popular books in their fields. One finding of the simulation analyses is thatwhile behaviour following rational choice theory might be useful if decisions can be made without dependencies on other agents, leading to a norm-behaviour for an agentdeviating from the norm is beneficial when many agents in a system are coupled by a common resource. Furthermore, with many coupled agents, total system resources are more fully exploited when not all agents are rational. The value of the paper lies in its attempt to link different content areas with the help of a dynamic model.
Inflated orders by retailers competing for scarce supplies are a common cause of the bullwhip effect, a frequent and costly problem in supply chains. This paper presents a formal model describing the impact to suppliers of retailer order inflation and describes an experiment to explore a suppliers reaction. We provide experimental evidence that shows that a reinforcing loop created by retailers inflated orders leads to excessive capacity, backlog and costs for the supplier. Subjects making capacity investment decisions for a supplier perform poorly compared to an optimal benchmark. In particular, long times to build capacity and aggressive retailer competition for scarce resources lead to poor subject performance. Furthermore, when subjects face retailers that moderately inflate orders (10% order inflation), the majority of the supplier costs are due to changes in capacity (investment/divestment). The costs associated with frequent changes in capacity capture the inherent complexity of setting the proper capacity level. In contrast, when subjects face retailers that aggressively inflate orders (50% order inflation), the majority of the supplier costs are due to supplier backlog. Costs associated with inadequate backlog management capture the inherent complexity of managing the positive feedback loop of retailers order inflation.
Organizational accidents are increasingly being studied using system dynamics (SD) tools. However, as compared to qualitative research of organizational accidents, most of the SD studies conducted so far lack grounding in actual data. Ironically, organizational accidents usually have available data in the form of inquiry reports and other public reports. This study reviews SD studies of organizational accidents and proposes ways to improve the rigor of SD analysis of organizational accidents. Eight relevant papers were identified and classified into two broad types: (1) practice-to-theorizing and (2) theorizing-to-practice. Practice-to-theorizing refers to deriving theories from analysis of actual organizational accidents, while theorizing-to-practice refers to use of pre-conceived theoretical model for research. The study found that both approaches can be improved through textual analysis techniques. The paper proposed data analysis procedures to improve robustness of SD analysis of organizational accidents.
Knowledge and expertise are the most precious assets of a call canter, which enables the staff to serve the customers on high quality. As call centers have a tense working condition, staff are likely to leave this job to a better position in the company or outside, so a real challenge for the managers of these centers is first to moderate the working condition , and then to cope with the high rate of turnovers. This article aims to the last, by modeling the cycle of training a new staff and building experiences, which helps him to serve the customers. By entering the risk of leaving job, this model is objected to find scenarios to reduce the costs of turnover.
This paper begins with background on government programs to spur economic growth through investment in green infrastructure and the creation of new markets. System dynamics has been put to good use in analyses of new and proposed markets dealing with energy and the environment. The paper describes simulation analysis of markets for renewable certificates, riparian shading offsets, wholesale electricity generation and carbon allowances. The paper summarizes the main policy conclusions from these studies, especially the conclusions that appear across markets and across countries. The paper concludes with a discussion of cap and dividend, a bold, new proposal for a carbon market in the USA.
This paper examines systemic strategy development using the example of a lead brokerage financial service provider. To do so, different elements of several systemic and cybernetic induced theories are combined to a three step approach: 1) system diagnosis to derive redesign actions, 2) identification of critical system variables, 3) creation of a modular software prototype with the help of a control loop model. This approach is induced by action research building on an interactive inquiry process that balances problem solving and actions implemented in a collaborative context. Data-driven collaborative analysis is implemented to better understand underlying causes and to enable future predictions about organisations and processes. The results of the approach application seem promising in two ways: 1) a real benefit for the lead brokerage financial service provider was generated by the operationalisation of its strategies, 2) the approach itself shows potential to be of general applicability to successfully support business processes with IT.
In the most of the done studies, such as Anindya Banerjee & Brill Russell (2005) and Anindya Banerjee & at el. (2001), inflation has a negative effect on markup. In this paper, the effects of inflation on profit of big industrial companies have been inspected. The variables such as inflation, international CPI levels, profits of agencies, sale (income), total costs, cost of R&D, total factor of product (TFP) and quality of products are being inspected. In this study, first the relation between the variables have been estimated by using panel data during 2000-200, then the accuired results were simulated by system dynamics method, we used from Vensim PLE,. The results show that the inflation causes more increase in incomes than expenses of agencies and finally the profit increase. The reason is that because the agencies dont respect the standards of the products in inflation conditions-, they generally can decrease the quality of the products and as a result increases the prices of their product.