When doing nothing is something. How task allocation strategies compromise between flexibility, efficiency, and inactive agents

Abstract

We expect that human organizations and cooperative animal groups should be optimized for collective performance. This often involves the allocation of different individuals to different tasks. Social insect colonies are a prime example of cooperative animal groups that display sophisticated mechanisms of task allocation. Here we discuss which task allocation strategies may be adapted to which environmental and social conditions. Effective and robust task allocation is a hard problem, and in many biological and engineered complex systems is solved in a decentralized manner: human organizations may benefit from insights into what makes decentralized strategies of group organization effective. In addition, we often find considerable variation among individuals in how much work they appear to contribute, despite the fact that individual selfishness in social insects is low and optimization occurs largely at the group level. We review possible explanations for uneven workloads among workers, including limitations on individual information collection or constraints of task allocation efficiency, such as when there is a mismatch between the frequency of fluctuations in demand for work and the speed at which workers can be reallocated. These processes are likely to apply to any system in which worker agents are allocated to tasks with fluctuating demand, and should therefore be instructive to understanding optimal task allocation and inactive workers in any distributed system. Some of these processes imply that a certain proportion of inactive workers can be an adaptive strategy for collective organization.

Deep evolutionary conservation of autism-related genes

“…In social insects, the fitness of an individual is dependent on the performance of the whole colony, and perhaps it is less costly for a large insect society to tolerate unresponsive individuals than to actively exclude them. Supporting this speculation, inactive individuals have been reported in several social insect species (29) and are usually interpreted as providing colonies with the advantages of a "reserve" labor force that will act when the colony faces a stressful situation (30). However, inactive honey bees do not always respond to changes in colony needs (31), and here we have identified individuals at the extremes of social responsiveness spectra who may not have any adaptive value to their colony.…”

The Effect of Multilingual Facilitation on Active Participation in MOOCs

“…It is tempting, then, to speculate that "inactive participants" are somehow also important for the emergence of a group of 30 active participants. This ties in with work that underscores the importance of lurkers (Preece, Nonneke, & Andrews, 2004) as well as with recent findings on the function of inactivity in decentralised complex systems (Charbonneau & Dornhaus, 2015). Therefore the conversion rate threshold of 20% is likely to be meaningful and might be used, together with the absolute number of active participants, as a reliable indicator of sustainable social dynamics during the first week of a MOOC.…”

A computational model of task allocation in social insects – ecology and interactions alone can drive specialisation

“…In environment types where both weak and strong specialisation can exist, weak specialisation can be more efficient than strong specialisation (see social learning in Figure 6). This seems to contradict an often made assumption that strong specialisation is one of the ways how colonies achieve higher efficiency [62,10]. However, it is established that this is not always the case and that the evidence for this is not consistent [14].…”

“…This principle describes non-uniform investment across a group that receives uniform benefit: some individuals significantly contribute to generating a common good, while some "free loaders" invest less or nothing and still reap the same benefits. Ultimately, this may give us a new perspective to tackle the puzzle of "lazy" workers in social insect colonies [12,10,11,37,13].…”

“…They live in elaborately organised colonies, capable of managing a complex network of simultaneous tasks; from scouting and foraging to colony defence, nest building, thermoregulation, and brood care. One of the key factors for their ecological success is the colony's ability to efficiently allocate its workforce to these different tasks, responding to frequent changes in external conditions and internal requirements [9,35,40,62,39,10,19,22,27,30,51,59,70]. The resulting "division of labour" (DOL) emerges from the task choices of individual workers without any central coordination or control.…”