Are Easy Options the Likely Choice?

Are Easy Options the Likely Choice?

How many options will be identified when a decision needs to be made? How much thought will go into developing a robust rationale for each option? Doing both of these takes effort. Unless there are incentives to invest effort, a decision will be made from one or few low quality options. That is a simple…

Incentives in Decision Governance

Incentives in Decision Governance

Decision rights will be exercised, and decision obligations discharged only if there are incentives to do so. If you need to make a decision and bear the consequences, i.e., exercise decision rights and discharge obligations, the only reason to do so is if you see how it makes sense with regards to what you want….

Decision Responsibilities in Decision Governance

Decision Responsibilities in Decision Governance

Being entitled to make decisions carries with it the responsibility for outcomes of actions that the decisions led to. Accountability can be implemented through decision governance by defining responsibilities for outcomes of decisions. The idea that decision responsibilities are the counterpart to decision rights is easy to understand. However, defining useful decision responsibilities involves finding…

When is Decision Governance Valuable?

When is Decision Governance Valuable?

Decision governance consists of defining how decisions should be made, and auditing that the processes for doing so are in fact applied. While it often seems like decisions are simply made, and there isn’t much to govern, this is incorrect. It is possible to completely change how to think about decisions, in particular in terms…

When Is It Useful to Reify Decisions?

When Is It Useful to Reify Decisions?

It has been successfully argued in research on organizations that a decision is an abstraction [1], if it is defined as a commitment to a course of action. If I say that I decided to go skiing tomorrow, is this abstract or concrete? The only thing you can observe will be my behavior and the…

When Is a Career Resilient to AI?

When Is a Career Resilient to AI?

The short answer: careers that reward creative problem solving in domains with scarce knowledge. Let’s unpack that.

Perplexing Secrecy of AI Designs

Perplexing Secrecy of AI Designs

If AI is made for profit, then should its design be confidential? This choice is part of AI product strategy. The decision on this depends on the following at least. What is the relationship of each of these to AI confidentiality? Correctness: The more likely the AI / algorithm is to make errors, the more…

Specialization versus Transparency

In a firm, what is the relationship between transparency of information and specialization of work?  Increasing specialization means that individuals over time deepen a relatively narrow set of skills and knowledge required for these, in response to the opportunities and problems they are responsible for. There are organizational structures that evidently encourage specialization, such as…

Alternative Incentives for Positive Network Effects

If a product/service should generate positive network effects, how do you make the value comparable for the 1st and the 1 billionth user? Accomplishing this means that you can offer more value to the early adopters, and if so, then the network of users should grow faster, or equivalently, adoption should be faster. “In economics,…

Economics of the Acceptability of an Argument

Economics of the Acceptability of an Argument

An argumentation framework [1] is a graph of nodes called arguments, and edges called attacks. If arguments are propositions, and “p1 attacks p2” reads “if you believe p1 then you shouldn’t believe p2”, then an argumentation framework looks like something you can use to represent the relationship between arguments and counterarguments in, say, a debate….

Speed vs Uncertainty

Speed vs Uncertainty

Figures 1 and 2 show cost versus time; Figure 1 shows long iterations, Figure 2 short iterations. We choose to do something at time zero, at the origin of the graph in the Figure, and when we do so, we do it under some assumptions that we made at that time. Dashed red lines convey…

Value of Competence

Value of Competence

If competence shortens learning, then its value is proportional to the cost of learning, that is, of iterations that would have been needed to achieve the effects of competence, but without having access to it.

Requirements Contracts: Definition, Design, and Analysis

What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a proposition to be called a requirement? In Requirements Engineering research, a proposition is a requirement if and only if specific grammatical and/or communication conditions hold. I offer an alternative, that a proposition is a requirement if and only if specific contractual, economic, and engineering relationships hold….