Decision Making and Institutional Design for Product Lifecycle Management

This paper proposes a new approach to decision making and institutional design for product lifecycle management based on social systems engineering. Product lifecycle problems are limited not only by technological issues, but also by economic and social issues. We construct an agent-based model of decision making systems consisting of human subjects such as producers, consumers, dismantlers and used-unit dealers. The focal point of this study is the analysis of which economic agents should collect used units and how product durability affects the formation of a recycling society. This paper also presents discussion of institutional design by comparing experimental results with current institutions using real-world data for several types of products.