Abstract
The increasing knowledge intensity of jobs, typical of a knowledge economy, highlights the role of firms as integrators of know-how and skills. As economic activity becomes mainly intellectual and requires the integration of specific and idiosyncratic skills, firms need to allocate skills to tasks and traditional hierarchical control results increasingly ineffective. In this work, we explore under what circumstances networks of agents, which bear specific skills, may self-organize in order to complete tasks. We use a computer simulation approach and investigate how local interaction of agents, endowed with skills and individual decision-making rules, may produce aggregate network structure able to perform tasks. To design algorithms that mimic individual decision-making, we borrow from computer science literature and, in particular, from studies addressing protocols that produce cooperation in Peer-to-Peer networks. We found that self-organization depends on the structural features of, formal or informal, organizational networks embedding both professionals, holding skills, and project managers, holding access to jobs.
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The software code can be obtained sending an e-mail to the second author of this paper.
A cut vertex is a vertex of a graph such that removal of the vertex causes an increase in the number of connected components.
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The author “Mollona” acknowledges financial support from the research project FIRB # RBNE05BFRK named ‘TOCAI.IT: Knowledge-oriented technologies for enterprise aggregation in Internet’.
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Mollona, E., Marcozzi, A. Self-emerging coordination mechanisms for knowledge integration processes. Mind Soc 8, 223–241 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-009-0057-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-009-0057-2