Promises: On Relationships Between Promises And Decisions
How is the common sense concept of promise related to decision making behavior in economics?
How To Enforce A Commitment?
Commitment mechanisms are strategies, agreements, or institutional arrangements deliberately established to ensure adherence to decisions made at an earlier time. How to design them?
Expectations: How Do Expectations About Others Form?
When we are in a decision situation with others, we form expectations about their behaviour, which becomes an input to our own subsequent decisions and interactions with them. How do these expectations form?
When To Delegate Decision Authority?
One of the questions when designing decision governance is whether to motivate an individual with authority to delegate it to someone else. Why would they do it?
Goal Displacement: What It Is And How To Mitigate It
Goal displacement refers to a situation where an individual, group, or organization shifts its focus from the intended objectives to secondary or substitute goals. Which factors increase, and which decrease the probability of goal displacement?
Crowding-In Effect: The Right Incentives Amplify the Right Motives
On how to amplify the decision-maker’s intrinsic motivation to make good decisions.
Crowding-Out Effect: The Wrong Incentives Erode the Right Motives
On how not to deteriorate the decision-maker’s intrinsic motivation to make good decisions.
Incentives: Negative Consequences of Incentive Mechanisms
Let’s assume that decision governance in a firm includes an incentive mechanism which is designed to financially reward decision makers in proportion to the number of options they consider in a decision situation. What could go wrong?
Goals: How to Improve Alignment to a Team Goal
Given some factors which influence goal selection, what can we do to help a team member select a goal that the team needs to achieve? In other words, how can we align an individual’s goals to the team goals? This is the topic in the rest of this text.
Goals: Factors Influencing Goal Selection
Understanding how individuals choose goals can provide insight into human decision-making and inform strategies for influencing the choice of goals through decision governance.
Goals: Factors That Stabilize and Destabilize Goals
Goal stability and change are influenced by a complex interplay of commitment strength, feedback mechanisms, external pressures, cognitive dissonance, and social reinforcement. Understanding these factors allows individuals and organizations to design decision making environments that either reinforce goal persistence or facilitate adaptive goal adjustments when necessary.
Goals: How Goals Form and Change
Understanding these mechanisms can help improve decision-making quality, improve leadership effectiveness, and help organizations design better incentive structures to align individual goals with priorities.
Goals: How Goals Shape Decisions
Goals shape how decisions are made by influencing information processing, risk preferences, decision complexity, strategy adaptation, and trade-offs between short-term and long-term objectives.
Incentives: Components of Incentive Mechanisms
An incentive mechanism is used to influence behavior. What are the components of an incentive mechanism, and how is that related to decision governance?
Motivated Reasoning: How To Detect And Mitigate Its Risks
Motivated reasoning consists of processing information in a way that aligns with one’s desires, beliefs, or goals, rather than neutrally evaluating evidence. How to mitigate it through decision governance?
What Interests Do Stakeholders Have in Decision Governance?
If we know who the stakeholders are, when designing decision governance, then we need to know their interests, so that we can make sure these are met through the decision process.
Selective Memory Can Be Desirable
Ease at which memory will be accessed, accuracy of memories, association of stimuli with memories they lead to, will all influence the information that a decision maker will use. Decision governance can to some extent influence what is recalled, how that is related to the choice at hand, and where attention is drawn.
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…
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…
Can an Artificial Intelligence System Decide Autonomously?
To say that something is able to decide requires that it is able to conceive more than the single course of action in a situation where it is triggered to act, that it can compare these alternative courses of action prior to choosing one, and that it likes one over all others as a result…
Machine/AI as Inventor? Notes on Thaler v. USPTO
Can “an artificial intelligence machine be an ‘inventor’ under the Patent Act”? According to the Memorandum Opinion filed on September 2, 2021, in the case 1:20-cv-00903, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) requires that the inventor is one or more people [1]. An “AI machine” cannot be named an inventor on a patent that…
What Happens to Intentional Concepts in Requirements Engineering if Intentional States Cannot Be Known?
I assume in this paper that the proposition “I cannot know your intentional states” is true. I consider its consequences on the use of so-called “intentional concepts” for Requirements Engineering. I argue that if you take this proposition to be true, then intentional concepts (e.g., goal, belief, desire, intention, etc.) start to look less relevant…
How Stakeholders’ Commitment May Affect the Success of Requirements Elicitation
Requirements elicitation consists in collecting information about the requirements and the environment of a system-to-be. It usually involves business analysts who are eliciting information, and stakeholders who are providing information. This paper investigates how the commitment of stakeholders to a RE project influences the results of elicitation. We suggest a way to measure the commitment…
What Stakeholders Will or Will not Say: Topic Importance in Requirements Engineering Elicitation Interviews
Interviewing stakeholders is a way to elicit information about requirements for a system-to-be. A difficulty when preparing such elicitation interviews is to select the topics to discuss, so as to avoid missing important information. Stakeholders may spontaneously share information on some topics, but remain silent on others, unless asked explicitly. We propose the Elicitation Topic…
Analysis and Design of Advice
Advice involves recommendations on what to think; through thought, on what to choose; and via choices, on how to act. Advice is information that moves by communication, from advisors to the recipient of advice. This book offers a general way to analyze advice. The analysis applies regardless of what the advice is about and from…
Techne Family of Formalisms for the Resolution of Requirements Problems
Between 2010 and 2013, I argued that Techne should be extended into a family of formalisms; this was related to some extent to the idea that Techne is an “abstract” requirements modeling language, something that a reviewer remarked in relation to the original Techne paper here. This led to a lot of discussions and writing…
Requirements Oracles
A requirements database contains the information elicited or otherwise collected, used, and produced during requirements engineering. From a requirements database, the requirements oracle selects information relevant for the resolution of the requirements problem, such as which goals aresatisfied, which domain assumptions are violated or maintained, which tasks cannot be executed together. Implemented oracles should enable…
A Core Ontology for Requirements
In their seminal paper (ACM T. Softw. Eng. Methodol., 6(1) (1997), 1–30), Zave and Jackson established a core ontology for Requirements Engineering (RE) and used it to formulate the “requirements problem”, thereby defining what it means to successfully complete RE. Starting from the premise that the stakeholders of the system-to-be communicate to the software engineer…
Revisiting the Core Ontology and Problem in Requirements Engineering
In their seminal paper in the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, Zave and Jackson established a core ontology for Requirements Engineering (RE) and used it to formulate the “requirements problem”, thereby defining what it means to successfully complete RE. Given that stakeholders of the system-to-be communicate the information needed to perform RE, we…
Clarifying Goal Models
Representation and reasoning about information system (IS) requirements is facilitated with the use of goal models to describe the desired and undesired IS behaviors. One difficulty in goal modeling is arriving at a shared understanding of a goal model instance, mainly due to different backgrounds of the system stakeholders who participate in modeling, and the…
Allocating Goals to Agent Roles During Multi-Agent Systems Requirements Engineering
Allocation of goal responsibilities to agent roles in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) influence the degree to which these systems satisfy nonfunctional requirements. This paper proposes a systematic approach that starts from nonfunctional requirements identification and moves towards agent role definition guided by the degree of nonfunctional requirements satisfaction. The approach relies on goal-dependencies to allow potential…
A More Expressive Softgoal Conceptualization for Quality Requirements Analysis
Initial software quality requirements tend to be imprecise, subjective, idealistic, and context-specific. An extended characterization of the common Softgoal concept is proposed for representing and reasoning about such requirements during the early stages of the requirements engineering process. The types of information often implicitly contained in a Softgoal instance are highlighted to allow richer requirements…
An Agent-Oriented Meta-model for Enterprise Modelling
The model identifies constructs that enable capturing the intrinsic characteristics of an agent system such as autonomy, intentionality, sociality, identity and boundary, or rational self- interest; an agent being an organizational actor and/or a software component. Such an approach of the concept of agent allows the analyst to have a holistic perspective integrating human and…
Formalizing Agent-Oriented Enterprise Models
This paper proposes an agent-oriented metamodel that provides rigorous concepts for conducting enterprise modelling. The aim is to allow analysts to produce an enterprise model that precisely captures the knowledge of an organization and of its business processes so that an agent-oriented requirements specification of the system-to-be and its operational corporate environment can be derived…