In one of his publications Aristotle states ”All human beings by their nature desire to know” [Kraut 1991]. This desire is initiated the day we are born and accompanies us for the rest of our life. While at a young age our parents serve as one of the principle sources for knowledge, this changes over the course of time. Technological advances and particularly the introduction of the Internet, have given us new possibilities to share and access knowledge from almost anywhere at any given time. Being able to access and share large collections of written down knowledge is only one part of the equation. Just as important is the internalization of it, which in many cases can prove to be difficult to accomplish. Hence, being able to request assistance from someone who holds the necessary knowledge is of great importance, as it can positively stimulate the internalization procedure. However, digitalization does not only provide a larger pool of knowledge sources to choose from but also more people that can be potentially activated, in a bid to receive personalized assistance with a given problem statement or question. While this is beneficial, it imposes the issue that it is hard to keep track of who knows what. For this task so-called Expert Finder Systems have been introduced, which are designed to identify and suggest the most suited candidates to provide assistance. Throughout this Ph.D. thesis a novel type of Expert Finder System will be introduced that is capable of capturing the knowledge users within a community hold, from explicit and implicit data sources. This is accomplished with the use of granular computing, natural language processing and a set of metrics that have been introduced to measure and compare the suitability of candidates. Furthermore, are the knowledge requirements of a problem statement or question being assessed, in order to ensure that only the most suited candidates are being recommended to provide assistance.
Philosophers, psychologists, and economists have long argued that certain decision rights carry not only instrumental value but may also be valuable for their own The ideas of autonomy, freedom, and liberty derive their intuitive appeal - partly - from an assumed positive intrinsic value of decision rights. Providing evidence for the existence of this intrinsic value and measuring its size, however, intricate. Here, we develop a method capable of achieving these goals. The data that the large majority of our subjects intrinsically value decision rights beyond their strumental benefit. The intrinsic valuation of decision rights has potentially important consequences for corporate governance, human resource management, and optimal job design: it may explain why managers value power, why employees appreciate with task discretion, why individuals sort into self-employment, and why the realloca- tion of decision rights is often very difficult and cumbersome. Our method and may also prove useful in developing an empirical revealed preference foundation concepts such as "freedom of choice" and "individual autonomy."
Authority and power permeate political, social, and economic life, but empirical knowledge about the motivational origins and consequences of authority is limited. We study the motivation and incentive effects of authority experimentally in an authority delegation game. Individuals often retain authority even when its delegation is in their material interest—suggesting that authority has nonpecuniary consequences for utility. Authority also leads to over provision of effort by the controlling parties, while a large percentage of subordinates underprovide effort despite pecuniary incentives to the contrary. Authority thus has important motivational consequences that exacerbate the inefficiencies arising from suboptimal delegation choices. {JEL C92, D23, D82)
