Introduction

Abstract

Modern society, with its overwhelming diversity of interests and developments and its ever growing complexity, can no longer be understood and governed by the paradigm of centralized decision making. In fact, rather than following a monolithic approach, distributed decision making has become the predominant methodology of handling complex systems. Democratic structures tend to transfer decision rights to those parts of the society that are actually affected, companies are separating into profit centers or are even outsourcing parts of their activities, and complex decision problems are solved in splitting them up into their components. Indeed, former well-defined relationships, particularly those of a strict hierarchical nature, are becoming obsolete and are being replaced with free display of activities.