Tobias Widmer

Improving Knowledge Provision for Shared Decision Making in Patient-Physician Relationships -- A Multiagent Organizational Approach

The paradigm of shared decision making in patient-physician relationships is well documented. Moreover, it is an integral aspect of sound patient centric healthcare delivery. Implementing such an approach within established healthcare processes has yet to be successfully realized. This void is causing problems in healthcare delivery in particular in EU countries such as Germany because knowledge sources are distributed and underlie strict privacy policies, while the lack of adequate shared decision making compromises the quality of healthcare delivery and can lead to errors and inefficient workflow. This paper serves to analyze the provision of personal guidance services for shared decision making in eHealth service networks. By doing so, we address the problem of distributed and privacy-aware knowledge sharing by the formation of agent-based organizations to represent the relationships of patients and physicians and study this problem from the perspective of multiagent systems, i.e. we develop technology enabled collaboration solutions. The efficacy of the proffered decision support system will be demonstrated by a scenario-based evaluation. We contend that such an approach will address the current void.

Efficiency of electronic service allocation with privately known quality

We characterize how a social planner can design electronic service allocation when the desired service quality of customers and the actual service quality of providers are private information. Because private information is present in our analysis, we derive a second-best allocation mechanism that satisfies incentive compatibility, individual rationality and budget balance. While using the first-best outcome as a benchmark, we study the efficiency properties of the associated optimal allocation rules. In a set of simulation experiments with uniformly and normally distributed private information, we find that the asymptotic efficiency of the second-best mechanism is bounded away from 100 percent even for a large number of customers and providers. This finding indicates that the agents in our model do not become informationally small as the market size increases.

Bid-Price Control for the Formation of Multiagent Organisations

Agents that participate in a multiagent organisation must receive a reasonable compensation for delivering services to this organisation. Otherwise, the agents would refrain from joining the organisation due to their self-interest. Thus, the formation of multiagent organisations is no mechanical process, but subject to considerations of the involved agents. We approach this decision problem by a bid-price approach from quantity-based Revenue Management to maximise each individual agent’s expected revenue. The proposed method is evaluated in a simulation with competing service provider agents. The results suggest that our approach is robust for most cases with low demand and outweighs non-discriminating formation processes when supply exceeds demand.

Electronic service matching: Failure of incentive compatibility in Vickrey auctions

Abstract We consider pricing schemes for matching customers and providers on double-sided markets for electronic services. While existing second-best solutions are incentive compatible, the associated payment functions are difficult to implement in real-world settings. Based on the Vickrey–Clarke–Groves (VCG) and the k -pricing mechanism, we propose two straightforward payment schemes that offer a practical alternative to the second-best solution. Our experiments provide evidence that the VCG payments fail to implement incentive compatibility. This failure is due to the interdependency of the participants’ utilities.

A Formalization of Multiagent Organizations in Business Information Systems

Multiagent (MA) organizations can be regarded as a functional part in business information systems, in which software agents negotiate conditions for participation in the organization. How the strategic behavior of self-interested agents and MA-Organizations affects the formation process, however, is still not known. This research is concerned with the specification of MA-Organizations in business information systems and the design of negotiation protocols for determining the agents participation conditions. We draw on mechanism design to model the participation decision of the agent and the organization as a bilateral trading game. In a simulation experiment we find that a rather simple manipulation scheme provides a suitable approximation for the equilibrium strategies employed by the agents.

Agent-Based Decision Support for Allocating Caregiving Resources in a Dementia Scenario

Due to the increasing number of Dementia patients, the overall costs for caregiving has grown by 32i¾?% between 2002 and 2008. The efficient use of smart decision support systems for managing ambulant care and mobile nursing services that provide professional care for Dementia patients is an important challenge to reduce cost and increase service quality. The optimal allocation of caregiving resources from different mobile nursing service firms to a growing number of Dementia patients, however, is a difficult problem in the healthcare domain. We approach this problem from a multiagent systems perspective by designing and implementing a distributed decision support system that utilizes an auction-based protocol for allocating caregiving resources subject to Dementia-specific service attributes. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed protocol by an early stage prototype implementation presenting the systems proof-of-concept.