Service Ecosystem Emergence from Primitive Actors in Service Dominant Logic: An Exploratory Simulation Study

Service-dominant (S-D) logic has been proposed as a theoretical foundation for understanding economic exchange and value cocreation from a service-for-service perspective. In the S-D logic framework, all economic entities are commonly represented as resource-integrating, service-providing actors, relying primarily on "operant" resources, such as skills and knowledge. Service exchange is coordinated by institutional arrangements, which form the bases of service ecosystems, the unit of analysis of value cocreation. Institutional arrangements and service ecosystems emerge from the resource integrating and service-exchanging activities of the actors. This paper reports a preliminary investigation of the emergence of these structures from basic actor relationships, through agent-based simulation. The simulations under different conditions show that a collection of agent interactions generates systemic behavior typical for service ecosystems. This paper also suggests directions for future research.