In 1963, Richard M. Cyert and James G. March from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) published a book, in which they describe their behavioral theory of the firm. The exact citation is:
- Cyert, Richard M. and March, James G., A Behavioral Theory of the Firm, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1963.
Therein, Cyert and March describe their theory of decision making in business organizations. They combine microeconomic theory with a study of the internal processes of a company concerning the formation of goals, expectations, and the implementation of choices. The behavioral theory of the firm made a great impact and has become important for much more recent research in organization theory and management (see ABTOF).
The book luckily also contains a complete listing of a computer program written in the very old programming language 20-GATE (Generalized Algebraic Translator, Extended) for the Bendix G-20 mainframe, as well as a sample printout of a program run. According to the source code, the program is from June 23, 1962. It implements the theoretical concepts and performs a simulation of two firms in a duopoly model over 50 time periods.
This is the attempt of a "perfect" translation of the original 20-GATE program to JavaScript. The 20-GATE code was hand-translated statement by statement to a semantically equivalent JavaScript program. Special care was taken to have as much as possible a 1:1 relationship between the original and the translated code and to exactly reproduce the original control flow (with quite some GOTO statements).
The original program took a set of punched cards as its input data and produced a long printout of data for 50 time periods. The JavaScript version also generates this printout, but I added also a simple line graph feature to view the development of a selected variable and the possibility to generate and download a "csv" file of all the output data, so that you can analyze it in a spreadsheet, statistics package, or in your own self-written programs.
Try out the simulation in your browser here: Simulation of A Behavioral Theory of the Firm
Read more about it at Norbert's Emulators.
Have fun!
Norbert