Analyzing Cooperation in Iterative Social Network Design

We introduce an approach to iteratively design `small' social networks used in software engineering together with methods analyzing the cooperation in the system. The degree of cooperation is measured by the emergence of coalitions and their stability over time. At the most abstract level, which we call the coalition view, coalitions are abstract entities that may dominate or attack other coalitions. During iterative design, these abstract entities are refined with agents and their dependencies constituting the coalitions (dependence view), the powers of sets of agents to see to goals (power view) and finally the beliefs, plans, tasks and goals of agents (agent view). The analysis methods predict the emergence of coalitions based on reciprocity and argumentation theory.