ISSN:1055-615X    

DOI:10.1002/j.1099-1174.1993.tb00043.x

出版商:Wiley    

年代:2014

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

AbstractThere are many formal approaches to specifying how the mental state of an agent entails the particular actions it will perform. These approaches put the agent at the center of analysis. For some questions and purposes, it is more realistic and convenient for the center of analysis to be the task environment, domain or society of which agents will be a part. This paper presents such a task environment‐oriented modeling framework that can work hand in hand with more agent‐centered approaches. Our approach features careful attention to the quantitative computational interrelationships between tasks, to what information is available (and when) to update an agent's mental state and to the general structure of the task environment rather than single‐instance examples. A task environment model can be used for both analysis and simulation, it avoids the methodological problems of relying solely on single‐instance examples and provides concrete, meaningful characterizations with which to state general theories. This paper is organized around an example model of co‐operative problem solving in a distributed sensor network.

ISSN:1055-615X    

DOI:10.1002/j.1099-1174.1993.tb00044.x

出版商:Wiley    

年代:2014

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

AbstractFormal organizations have a division of labor and some form of co‐ordination. This paper explores how these social structures could be generated by an exchange process that governs work flow through an organization. Specifically, the exchange process controls how work tasks are assigned and carried out, and how members receive rewards for participating in a work group of the organization. A discrete‐event simulation model is used to explore how the exchange process generates division of labor and co‐ordination networks. The model contains members, called bureaucrats, with two kinds of skills: skill at referring work to others; and skill in completing work tasks. Both kinds of skills are distributed differentially across bureaucrats. Two types of rational exchange are explored:independentexchange andpooledexchange. For independent exchange, rewards go the bureaucrat who completes the task; in pooled exchange rewards are shared with the bureaucrat who referred the task. Both exchange processes generate a division of labor in a work group, with pooled exchange exhibiting the most pronounced division of labor. Also, pooled exchange leads to more efficient processing of work than independent exchange.

ISSN:1055-615X    

DOI:10.1002/j.1099-1174.1993.tb00045.x

出版商:Wiley    

年代:2014

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

AbstractOrganizations involving human and computer agents are constrained by a variety of factors including: task properties and arrangements; level of technology; knowledge held by, and distributed among, the agents; information and administrative structures; and organizational norms and policies. An important challenge to the scientific community is to develop, validate and apply theories and models to help managers re‐engineer their organizations for higher levels of performance. Our research on organizational problem solving aims to develop a computational model of organizations to study interrelationships between agents' knowledge, task requirements, and organization structures and policies. This paper reports the first step of our research toward a computational organizational model—the i‐AGENTS framework, a prototype computer system for modeling organizations of intelligent agents. i‐AGENTS is composed of a number of high‐level concepts: tasks, agents, organization and communication. A task is described in detail by task action, task object and task constraints; an agent is modeled to consist of cognitive attributes and expertise; role‐based organizational structure is adopted for describing organizations. From an organization perspective, i‐AGENTS extends traditional information processing models of organization (Galbraith 1977) by explicitly addressing the role of agents' knowledge of both the problem domain and the organization in problem solving. When viewed from an engineering perspective, our research is the first step toward an organizational problem‐solving model that merges organization theory and distributed artificial intelligence and can be used to simulate and analyze organizational behavior of teams in engineering domains at a very specific level of detail.

ISSN:1055-615X    

DOI:10.1002/j.1099-1174.1993.tb00046.x

出版商:Wiley    

年代:2014

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

AbstractThis paper addresses the issue of agent style—proactive and reactive—from a theoretical perspective. The results show that agent style, though often considered key in decision making, only affects the organization's performance when the organization is under moderate time pressure. Further, the effect of agent style depends on the type of training given to organizational agents and the internal condition under which the organization operates. This research suggests that, when resources are scarce, organizations should spend these resources on organizational design and on increasing the accuracy of incoming information rather than on altering the agents' style.

ISSN:1055-615X    

DOI:10.1002/j.1099-1174.1993.tb00047.x

出版商:Wiley    

年代:2014

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

AbstractThis paper presents a mathematical model to study the joint impact of organizational design and of the task environment on the decision performance of hierarchical organizations with limited internal communication. The problem context is a special class of distributed situation assessment problems, where possible patterns of binary variables are to be classified on the basis of partial and noise‐corrupted information. Structural properties of tasks and organizations are described using a graph formalism, and optimal decision strategies at all decision makers are determined. Organizational expertise is characterized in the form of a Team Relative Operating Characteristic (TROC) curve, thereby replacing the organization by an equivalent single decision maker. Implementing the model, issues of task decomposition and the process of matching organizations with tasks are discussed.

ISSN:1055-615X    

DOI:10.1002/j.1099-1174.1993.tb00048.x

出版商:Wiley    

年代:2014

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

AbstractThis paper examines the costs and benefits of delegated decision making in a multi‐division firm. The delegation versus centralization decision hinges on the trade‐off between: (1) the costs of communication between divisions of the firm and the firm's headquarters under centralized decision making; and (2) gains from closer controls under centralized control. The performance of the two organizational designs are examined in a stylized principal‐agent model with the firm's central management represented by the principal and two divisions of the firm by two self‐interested agents. In a centralized scheme the agents report private information to the center who then sets production quotas and co‐ordinates the agents' production. Under delegation, the production and co‐ordination decisions are left to the agents. Central management simply rewards the agents based on observed performance. The advantages of centralization over delegation are shown to diminish when the correlation between the agents' private information approaches the polar extremes of perfect correlation and statistical independence.

ISSN:1055-615X    

DOI:10.1002/j.1099-1174.1993.tb00049.x

出版商:Wiley    

年代:2014

数据来源: WILEY

ISSN:1055-615X    

DOI:10.1002/j.1099-1174.1993.tb00050.x

出版商:Wiley    

年代:2014

数据来源: WILEY