Aspects of Garbage Can Processes: Temporal Order and the Role of Expediting

Abstract

We examine the garbage can model as a case of organizational decision making under temporal order constraints such as in the case of a dispatcher on whose desk problems, solutions, and choice opportunities arrive in a stochastic order and get resolved at particular points in time. We follow the original (Cohen, March, & Olsen, 1972) simulation except their particular setup where the problems and decision makers have access to information regarding the decisions made up to the end of the previous period a rule that we consider to be myopic. Making the assignment (or rule) less myopic would be to provide information about problems that were attached in the current period and about decision makers that were assigned a choice this period to problems and to decision makers. We also bring in an expediter who can select one or two choices to expedite each period. The expediter is endowed with a total energy of 55 that can be expended on resolving any choice to decision. Each period after the problems are attached and decision makers assigned to choices, the expediter scans the choices. The expediter selects the two choices that are the closest to decision and expends energy to move them to decision. The simulations we ran show improvement in certain situations as measured by the number of unsolved problems. We discuss our results in the sense of providing simple design features to a complex decision situation. We also discuss the paradigm of the garbage can model in the larger context of organizational decision making.

Citation

Seshadri, S. and Shapira, Z. (2012), "Aspects of Garbage Can Processes: Temporal Order and the Role of Expediting", Lomi, A. and Harrison, J.R. (Ed.) The Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice: Looking Forward at Forty (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 36), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 165-188. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X(2012)0000036010