Toward an Integration of Agent- and Activity-Centric Approaches in Organizational Process Modeling: Incorporating Incentive Mechanisms

An integrative viewpoint in which the transactional aspects of agent-centric concerns--for example, economic incentives for agents to perform--are integrated with decision and informational aspects of a process is explored.

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to organizational modeling that combines both agent-centric and activity-centric approaches. Activity-centric approaches to process modeling capture the mechanistic components of a process (including aspects of workflow, decision, and information), but agent-centric approaches capture specific aspects of the human component. In this paper, we explore an integrative viewpoint in which the transactional aspects of agent-centric concerns—for example, economic incentives for agents to perform—are integrated with decision and informational aspects of a process. To illustrate issues in this approach, we focus on modeling incentive mechanisms in a specific sales process and present results from an extensive simulation experiment. Our results highlight the importance of considering the effects of incentives when decision and informational aspects of a process undergo changes.