Knowledge friction in universities, approach from game theory

Abstract

In today's market economies, organizations see knowledge as one of their most valuable and strategic resources and seek to properly manage it so that it becomes a competitive advantage (Teece, 1988; Hamel and Prahalad, 1990, Drucker, 1994; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995; Boisot, 1998; Spender, 1996; Senge, 1990). Although many organizations make significant investments in technology and tools to promote knowledge sharing, cultural, behavioral, and structural aspects are the main determinants of success (Sharma and Bhattacharya, 2013). Organizational knowledge processes are, by their nature, generally social and complex. The behaviors related to sharing knowledge of organizational agents are full of situations of conflict of interest or dilemmas in which they receive different payments based on their strategic decisions. Such situations can be modeled as games. This article presents the approach to a particular dilemma, that of the knowledge friction in an Institution of Higher Education through Game Theory, describing a non-cooperative game model that allows showing the scope of said situation according to the decisions considered to be done by employees and employer and their related payments, exploring different decision-making scenarios.