Towards Reasoning About Strategic Moves and Reciprocity With i* and Game Trees

Reciprocity is an important motivator of human judgement and is frequently used to justify decisions. It is a common feature of social relationships wherein beneficial conduct is encouraged through rewards while deleterious behaviors are discouraged via punishment. However, despite its ubiquity and pervasiveness in intraand inter-organizational relationships, there are circumstances when reciprocation can yield mutually injurious outcomes for impacted actors. Game theorists have proposed game trees for analyzing strategic decisions such as those pertaining to reciprocation. However, game trees are lacking in certain respects and only codify limited aspects of a focal decision as well as its problem and solution spaces. This paper discusses exploratory research into the modeling of strategic moves and reciprocity using i* and game trees. It discusses the main ideas that are relevant for developing a framework for analyzing strategic moves and reciprocity in a systematic and structured manner via a combination of these modeling techniques. Such a framework can help organizational decision-makers to exhaustively contemplate decisions concerning reciprocation by accommodating their predispositions and prerogatives.