Institutions and cultures evolve adaptively in response to the current environmental incentives, usually. But sometimes institutional change is due to stochastic drives beyond current fitness, including drift, path dependency, blind imitation, and complementary cooperation in fluctuating environments. Disentangling the selective and stochastic components of social system change enables us to identify the key features to organizational development in the long run. Evolutionary approaches provide organizational science abundant theories to demonstrate organizational evolution by tracking particular beneficial or harmful features. We measure these different drivers empirically in institutional evolution among 20,000 Minecraft communities with the help of two of the most applied evolutionary models, the Price equation and the bet-hedging model. As a result, we find strong selection pressure on administrative rules and information rules, suggesting that their positive correlation with community fitness is the main reason for their frequency change. We also find that stochastic drives decrease the average frequency of administrative rules. The result makes sense when explained in light of evolutionary bet-hedging. We show through the bet-hedging result that institutional diversity contributes to the growth and stability of rules related to information, communication, and economic behaviors.
翻译:通常情况下,机构和文化的适应性会随着当前的环境激励而变化。但有时,机构变革是由于超越当前适应性的随机性驱动,包括漂移、路径依赖、盲目模仿和在波动环境中的互补合作。分离社会系统变化的选择性和随机性组成部分使我们能够确定长期组织发展的关键特征。进化方法提供了组织科学丰富的理论,通过跟踪特定有益或有害的特征来显示组织演变。我们用20,000个矿产品社区在机构演变中的经验性地测量了这些不同的驱动因素。我们通过两种最应用的进化模型,即价格方程式和套期模型,在体制演化过程中进行了衡量。结果,我们在行政规则和信息规则上发现强大的选择压力,表明它们与社区健康的积极相关性是其频率变化的主要原因。我们还发现,这种随机性驱动降低了行政规则的平均频率。从进化中解释的结果是有道理的。我们通过预想的结果显示,机构多样性有助于信息、通信和经济行为规则的增长和稳定性。