The increasing knowledge intensity of jobs, typical of a knowledge economy, highlights the role of firms as integrators of know how and skills. As economic activity becomes mainly intellectual and requires the integration of specific and idiosyncratic skills, firms need to allocate skills to tasks and traditional hierarchical control may result increasingly ineffective. In this work, we explore under what circumstances networks of agents, which bear specific skills, may self-organize in order to complete tasks. We use a computer simulation approach and investigate how local interaction of agents, endowed with skills and individual decision-making rules, may produce aggregate network structure able to perform tasks. To design algorithms that mimic individual decision-making, we borrow from computer science literature and, in particular, from studies addressing protocols that produce cooperation in P2P networks. We found that self-organization depends on imitation of successful peers, competition among agents holding specific skills, and the structural features of, formal or informal, organizational networks embedding both professionals, holding skills, and project managers, holding access to jobs.

Many peer-to-peer (P2P) applications require that nodes behave altruistically in order to perform tasks collectively. Here we examine a class of simple protocols that aim to self-organize P2P networks into clusters of altruistic nodes that help each other to complete jobs requiring diverse skills. We introduce a variant (called ResourceWorld) of an existing model (called SkillWorld) and compare results obtained in extensive (ten billion interactions) simulation experiments. It was found that for both model variants altruistic behavior was selected when certain cost/benefit constraints were met. Specifically, ResourceWorld selects for altruism only when the collective benefit of an action is at least as high as the individual cost. This gives a minimal method for realizing so-called "social rationality," where nodes select behaviors for the good of the collective even though actions are based on individual greedy utility maximization. Interestingly, the SkillWorld model evidences a kind of superaltruism in which nodes are prepared to cooperate even when the cost is higher than the benefit.

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Competition, Computer simulation, Cooperation, Dynamic organization networks, Knowledge-based economy, Knowledge management, Peer-to-peer system, Task allocation,