Programming Incentives in Information Systems

Information systems are becoming ever more reliant on different forms of social computing, employing individuals, crowds or assembled teams of professionals. With humans as first-class elements, the success of such systems depends heavily on how well we can motivate people to act in a planned fashion. Incentives are an important part of human resource management, manifesting selective and motivating effects. However, support for defining and executing incentives in today's information systems is underdeveloped, often being limited to simple, per-task cash rewards. Furthermore, no systematic approach to program incentive functionalities for this type of platforms exists. In this paper we present fundamental elements of a framework for programmable incentive management in information systems. These elements form the basis necessary to support modeling, programming, and execution of various incentive mechanisms. They can be integrated with different underlying systems, promoting portability and reuse of proven incentive strategies. We carry out a functional design evaluation by illustrating modeling and composing capabilities of a prototype implementation on realistic incentive scenarios.