Abstract Research Summary Companies are increasingly opening up decision‐making, involving employees on all levels in distributed—and purportedly “hierarchy‐free”—decision processes. We examine how hierarchy reaches into such “democratized” systems, arguing that it is a source of homophily biases idea evaluation decisions. Using data set from internal crowdfunding at one the world's largest ind...

We discuss settings where several “agents” combine efforts to solve problems. This is a well-known setting in distributed artificial intelligence. Our work addresses theoretical questions in this model which are motivated by the work of Deng and Papadimitriou [11]. We consider optimization problems, in particular load balancing and virtual circuit routing, in which the input is divided among th...

Abstmct A set of performance scenarios as a function of periodic communication is hypothes ized and lea& to an analysis of optimal communication rates. In general, we expect that performance o v e r time follows certain patterns with respect to the reception of messages regarding global state. To explore the hypothesis, we present a model of distributed game automata which make decisions probab...

We argue that the phenomenon of autocatalytic decision overload (ADO) may be a key mechanism contributing to catastrophic collapse of command and control (C2) systems. We introduce the concept of ADO and describe typical scenarios for such a collapse. We then provide a simple nonlinear difference equation model for the dynamics of error propagation in C2 systems which exhibits the ADO phenomena...

Decision makers on supply chains face an uncertain, dynamic, and strategic multiagent environment. We report on Deep Maize, an agent we designed to participate in the 2003 Trading Agent Competition Supply Chain Management (TAC/SCM) game. Our design employs an idealized equilibrium analysis of the SCM game to factor out the strategic aspects of the environment and to define an expected profitabl...

Sensor random locations and sensor failures can cause coverage holes, routing voids and disconnections and thus degrade sensor network performance. In this paper, we present a self-healing approach that utilises a few mobile sensors to deal with the problems. A mobile sensor can move to an area with a coverage hole or routing void and significantly improve network performance. We design distrib...