Author: Simon Angus

Watercooler chat, organizational structure and corporate culture by Newton, Wait and Angus, just released as a working paper.

Abstract:
Modeling firms as networks of employees, occasional collaborative decision making around the office watercooler changes long run employee behavior (corporate culture). The culture that emerges in a given team of employees depends on team size and on how the team is connected to the wider firm. The implications of the model for organizational design are explored and related to empirical research on communication, innovation, the size and decision making of corporate boards and trends in the design of hierarchical structures.

“Stochastic stability in assignment problems“, by Klaus and Newton, just published in the Journal of Mathematical Economics.

Check out the summary of existing literature on the emergence of norms in matching problems at sharedintentions.net.

Simon Angus appeared today on ABC’s Radio National – Afternoons, hosted by Michael Mackenzie, to discuss joint work with Jonathan Newton recently published in PLoS Computational Biology (and featured on this site here).

The discussion mostly focused on the background to the paper — namely the Vygotskian intelligence hypothesis of Michael Tomasello and others, and his recent research that aims to illicit the key cognitive differences between human infants and related apes in settings in which the hall-marks of shared intentionality might be expected to arise.

You can download or listen to the discussion here.

“Emergence of Shared Intentions is Coupled to the Advance of Cumulative Culture“, by Angus and Newton, just published at PLoS Computational Biology.

Check out the video at the study’s page right here on sharedintentions.net.