Measuring Synergy from Benevolence in a Network Organization

In a complex adaptive system, diverse agents perform various actions without adherence to a predefined structure. The achievement of joint actions will be a result of continual interactions among them that shape a dynamic network. Agents may form an ad hoc organization based on dynamic network of interactions for the purpose of achieving a long term objective, which is called a Network Organization (NO). For the dominant influences of the network substrate in an NO, multiple effects of it have an impact on the NO behaviors and directions. We envisioned several dimensions of such effects to be synergy, social capital, externality, influence, etc. The focus of this paper is on measuring synergy as one of those possible network effects. Synergy describes different modalities of compatibility among agents when performing a set of coherent and correspondingly different actions. When agents are under no structural obligation to contribute, synergy is quantified through multiple forms of serendipitous agent chosen benevolence among them. The approach of this paper is to measure four types of benevolence and the pursuant synergies from them stemming from agent interactions. We exemplify this approach using a case study of a multiplayer online game.