Knowledge sharing in an organization - Share or not?

Knowledge sharing is an important issue to knowledge management. Because knowledge is considered as a resource of organization competition and a kind of strategic capital, the more the knowledge is expanded in an organization, the more the capacity of competition is. Although there are many theoretical literatures that suggest management means or normative rules to prompt knowledge sharing in an organization, it is difficult to evaluate the effect of knowledge sharing in an organization. The behavior of knowledge sharing among individuals in an organization is involved in the characteristics of knowledge, a conflict of interests, and interaction among actors and the organization that actors reside in. Therefore, the phenomenon of knowledge sharing is the result of dynamics, complexity, nonlinear interaction among knowledge seekers and providers, and the organization that actors belong to. In this paper, agent-based modeling is proposed for exploring the effect of knowledge sharing in an organization. The decisionmaking whether an actor share their knowledge with other is simply drawn an analogy to the prisoners´ dilemma game. According to the different actor´s payoff due to the characteristics of knowledge, the situations of knowledge sharing in an organization is discussed. According to the result of experiences, we found that no matter what types of knowledge sharing payoff matrices were, agents finally shared their knowledge with others. Nevertheless, most agents would take the Tit-for-Tat strategy.