Designing for Incentives: Better Information Sharing for Better Software Engineering

Abstract

Software-reliant systems permeate all aspects of modern society. The resulting interconnectedness and associated com- plexity has resulted in a proliferation of diverse stakeholders with conflicting goals. Thus, contemporary software engi- neering is plagued by incentive conflicts, in settling on design features, allocating resources during the development of products, and allocating computational resources at run- time. In this position paper, we describe some of these problems and outline a research agenda in bridging to the economic theory of mechanism design, which seeks to align incentives in multi-agent systems with private information and conflicting goals. The ultimate goal is to advance a principled methodology for the design of incentive-compatible approaches to manage the dynamic processes of software engineering.