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Convention evolution in organizations and markets

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Abstract

Conventions are essential for the coordination of multi-agent systems. However, in many systems conventions can not be legislated in advance and need to emerge during the system's activity. As designers of such systems we may wish to ensure that conventions will evolve rapidly. Given a classical model for convention evolution where agents tend to mimic agents they interact with, the designer can control the organizational structure of the system in order to speedup the evolution of conventions. This paper introduces a study of convention evolution in the context of basic organizational structures. Our study sheds light on a basic aspect of organizational design which has not been discussed in the literature, and which is crucial for efficient design of non-trivial multi-agent systems.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, 32000, Haifa, Israel

    Moshe Tennenholtz

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  1. Moshe Tennenholtz
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Tennenholtz, M. Convention evolution in organizations and markets. Comput Math Organiz Theor 2, 261–283 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00132312

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