Virtual Organizations as Electronic Services

Virtual organizations are flexible organizations, dynamically built from components of existing organizations. There are many advantages to virtual organizations, yet they are rare because successful implementation of such a dynamic design requires a significant technology infrastructure and a complex organizational architecture. This article takes a design approach and proposes such a technology infrastructure based on electronic services, formal semantics, and multi-dimensional ontologies. Organizational components are formally described as services, and placed in multi-dimensional ontologies, not only to capture their structural components, but also their organizational goals and audiences. Such multi-dimensional ontologies are not only useful to describe and search for organizational components, but also to efficiently build larger components from existing units. The architecture is extended to include virtual communities, virtual transactions, and virtual social institutions. The impact of such an architecture on transaction efficiency, organizational flexibility and adaptation, power structure, individual privacy, and organizational dissent are discussed

The Design of Trust Networks

One can use trust networks to find trustworthy information, people, products, and services on public networks. Hence, they have the potential to combine the advantages of search, recommendation systems, and social networks. But proper design and correct incentives are critical to the success of such networks. In this paper, I propose a trust network architecture that emphasizes simplicity and robustness. I propose a trust network with constrained trust relationships and design a decentralized search and recommendation process. I create both informational and monetary incentives to encourage joining the network, to investigate and discover other trustworthy agents, and to make commitments to them by trusting them, by insuring them, or even by directly investing in them. I show that making the correct judgments about trustworthiness of others and reporting it truthfully are the optimum strategies since they reward the agents both with information by providing access to more of the network and with monetary payments by paying them for their services as information intermediaries. The extensive income potential from the trust connections creates strong incentives to join the network, to create reliable trust connections, and to report them truthfully