SOME SIMPLE DESIGN PROBLEMS FOR DISTRIBUTED ORGANIZATIONS'

We consider the problem of designing an organization that can support the execution of certain decision-making activities. We model an organization by a graph that describes its communica-tion capabilities, and we assume that the desired decision-making activity defines another graph describing the required communication. We then formulate a number of variants of the problem of optimally choosing the organizational graph so as to satisfy the communication requirements. For some of these variants we provide algorithms that solve the organizational design problem, while for some others we show that they are computationally intractable