Model for knowledge-sharing strategies: a game theory analysis

Abstract

Recently, knowledge management (KM) has drawn immense attention from researchers and practitioners in many industries and has become increasingly important in business management practice. From the resource-based view, the integration of individuals’ specialized organizational capability through KM has been considered crucial to the creation and sustainability of competitive advantages. However, most KM literature tends to focus on the ‘technology side’ of KM such as issues in information and communication technology (ICT) platforms or systems. As we have observed, many KM attempts died with their costly, advanced, high-tech ICT systems. It is becoming clear that KM cannot be successful without appropriate strategies for encouraging the sharing of valuable knowledge, because people in organizations may not be motivated to share knowledge and may even prefer not to share their knowledge in order to preserve their intellectual or proprietary values in organizations. This paper aims to study the behavioural dynamics of knowledge-sharing in organizations and to derive a model for knowledge-sharing strategies. Two fundamental strategic choices for firms studied in this paper are whether or not to invest in ICT platforms and whether or not to offer rewards for sharing. A theoretic model based on game theory is developed to study the interaction between employees’ knowledge sharing behaviours and firms’ knowledge-sharing strategies. Then, based on the results of game modelling, a new knowledge taxonomy is developed from the perspective of knowledge-sharing dynamics and a framework for knowledge-sharing strategies is proposed.