Effective Influence Abstractions for Organizational Design

Organizational structures often employ abstraction to specify broadly-applicable behavioral roles and guidelines to agents, where abstraction streamlines the design process and leaves agents room for tailoring actions to the evolving situation. Too much abstraction, however, can provide too little guidance towards fruitful joint activities or burden agents with solving complex coordination problems. In this paper, we examine how abstraction choices for organizational influences affect both the process of designing organizations and the performance of a multiagent system using designed organizations. To do so, we identify dimensions of abstraction pertinent to organization design processes and outcomes. Mapping these dimensions to an example domain, we empirically evaluate organizations at different points in the abstraction space to inform an analytical framework for understanding the impact of abstraction in organizational design. Finally, we use our new framework to converge on task-delineated abstractions as a general-purpose organizing heuristic, and confirm this heuristic’s effectiveness empirically.