Exploring Foundations for Using Simulations in IS Research

Simulation has been adopted in many disciplines as a means for understanding the behavior of a system by imitating it through an artificial object that exhibits a nearly identical behavior. Although simulation approaches have been widely adopted for theory building in disciplines such as engineering, computer science, management, and social sciences, their potential in the IS field is often overlooked. The aim of this paper is to understand how different simulation approaches are successfully used in IS research, thereby providing hypotheses that allow deriving methodological guidelines for subsequent studies. A survey of 69 pieces of IS research provides the grounding for defining a taxonomy of simulation approaches and for identifying possible application patterns linking simulation approaches to their theory contributions, research domains and information views.