Multi-agent Simulations of Mutual Trust Management Strategies as a Base of Innovative Organizational Forms Engineering

The emergence of the new business context is creating innovative systems and models of work, having a deep impact on business environment and organizational interdependencies. In many modern cases such systems consist of a network of business agents which are autonomous in their behavior, believes and values, but should maintain interaction between each other in order to enhance overall innovation capacity and competitiveness. Distributed and cooperative multi-agent networks should be considered as an inimitable asset and collaborations and networks encompass a broad range of inter-organizational or even inter-personal relationships. These forms of conducting business activity are characterized by a low volume of transaction costs and the grade of mutual trust between the agents represents the crucial factor for its formation. This work applies the concept of multi-agent simulations to study impact of alternative trust management strategies on the overall effectiveness of the enterprise. A real case of the software freelance market is used for simulation experiments based on the NetLogo multi-agent platform. Analysis of simulations shows that cognitive trust management strategies give advantage even in environments with a high level of information noise. Developed multi-agent decentralized algorithms were generalized and can be applied for automation of routine tasks in other domains where trust management in networks of cooperative agents plays an important role.