Product recall is a social scheme for protecting consumers from unanticipated damage due to defective products. As people’s demands for safety have increased, it is required socially as well as administratively to establish an effective and trustworthy scheme for product recall. Institutional design of product recall, however, has been studied mainly based on past experiences; some method for doing it with rationale is highly desired. In this research, we applied a method of social simulation that is based on a multi-agent model to product recall in order for developing a simulation method useful for its institutional design. By observing interacting behaviours of agents in a virtual society, it is possible to search for the conditions where the designated goals of product recall are achievable. As a result of test simulation, it was demonstrated that the proposed simulation can be used to obtain insights useful for designing a product recall system. (Author/publisher)
Abstract