Title :
Information overload and human priority queuing
Author :
Sharma, Ashok ; Jagannathan, Krishna ; Varshney, Lav R.
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Electr. Eng., IIT Madras, Chennai, India
fDate :
June 29 2014-July 4 2014
Abstract :
In today´s regime of information overload, it is reasonable to model a human executing routine tasks such as responding to emails as a priority queue. Humans typically prioritize task execution based on intrinsic motivators such as interest in the task, as well as extrinsic motivation stemming from the importance of the task to the sender. We view the human priority queue from the perspective of a principal-agent problem and characterize the effect of misalignment between the task sender´s and task receiver´s priorities. Our model provides insights into how different levels of misalignment affect delays of tasks of varying importance. Further, our approach starts to quantitatively address the effect of human dynamics in routine communication tasks, such as responding to emails.
Keywords :
organisational aspects; queueing theory; extrinsic motivation; human dynamics; human priority queuing; information overload; intrinsic motivators; principal-agent problem; priority misalignment; task execution; Correlation; Cost function; Electronic mail; Information theory; Organizations; Random variables; Reactive power;
Conference_Titel :
Information Theory (ISIT), 2014 IEEE International Symposium on
Conference_Location :
Honolulu, HI
DOI :
10.1109/ISIT.2014.6874949