Competitive dynamics and gaming simulation: lessons from a fishing industry simulator

Experiments with a gaming simulator of the fishing industry show that a wide range of firm and industry performance can arise from players’ differing perceptions of the competitive environment. When transferred into the arena of applied strategy development, the results suggest that modellers should give more attention to modelling alternative conceptualizations of strategic intent in the minds of rival business leaders and the firms they create. This new interpretive emphasis should complement the traditional modelling of cross-functional coordination that has been the hallmark of much published work in strategic modelling and simulation. When leaders and firms in the same industry adopt quite different views of the overall system of resources in the industry, it is important to model the heterogeneity of rival firms in order to understand the dynamic performance of the firm and the industry. We propose a modelling approach that captures heterogeneity among the strategic resources that rival firms seek to build and in the operating goals and coordinating processes they use to build them.